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LucHow to find outstanding companies as an angel or VC
This piece is part of my intro to VC series. I wrote these short essays as a way to accelerate my learning and make this opaque world more transparent. How you source as an early-stage investor defines the quality of your outcomes. Most VCs build the top of the funnel using one or two of these techniques. Here I want to give a complete overview and point out what’s great about each of these, what’s not, and how to improve.Network drivenThe best companies often come from the edge of your netwo...
Luc(re)Building the Modern Finance Stack
Authors: Luc de Leyritz & Sam Cash, originally posted here We believe there’s a meaningful opportunity for large scale businesses to be created in the B2B fintech space by a) streamlining time-consuming workflows which are currently performed manually by the finance team and b) increasing the penetration of these tools in the European SMB market. There are about 23m SMBs in Europe, all of whom have to manage their finances. However, most don’t use specialised software. Accounting software is ...
LucThis principle from probabilistic thinking will make you a great early-stage investor
The main lesson you can take from the literature on cognitive biases is that our brains evolved in ways that can be harmful to us. The desire to be right, or aversion to loss, is one of these powerful biases that probably originated in situations like hunting in abundant, but also lion-infested regions, which meant painful death. As with most cognitive biases, it ported pretty poorly to situations where being wrong leads to losing some money or not getting retweeted, while being right exposes...
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LucHow to find outstanding companies as an angel or VC
This piece is part of my intro to VC series. I wrote these short essays as a way to accelerate my learning and make this opaque world more transparent. How you source as an early-stage investor defines the quality of your outcomes. Most VCs build the top of the funnel using one or two of these techniques. Here I want to give a complete overview and point out what’s great about each of these, what’s not, and how to improve.Network drivenThe best companies often come from the edge of your netwo...
Luc(re)Building the Modern Finance Stack
Authors: Luc de Leyritz & Sam Cash, originally posted here We believe there’s a meaningful opportunity for large scale businesses to be created in the B2B fintech space by a) streamlining time-consuming workflows which are currently performed manually by the finance team and b) increasing the penetration of these tools in the European SMB market. There are about 23m SMBs in Europe, all of whom have to manage their finances. However, most don’t use specialised software. Accounting software is ...
LucThis principle from probabilistic thinking will make you a great early-stage investor
The main lesson you can take from the literature on cognitive biases is that our brains evolved in ways that can be harmful to us. The desire to be right, or aversion to loss, is one of these powerful biases that probably originated in situations like hunting in abundant, but also lion-infested regions, which meant painful death. As with most cognitive biases, it ported pretty poorly to situations where being wrong leads to losing some money or not getting retweeted, while being right exposes...
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Share Dialog
Our instincts are often right.
After 15 days of somewhat consecutive publishing, I realized my fears of writing poor essays were well-founded. I thought my essays would be irrelevant, uninsightful, and boring. It turns they are, like most things written online because I failed to ask myself the most important question.
So what?
The problem with our writing is that it often does not resonate with the people who read it, it often does not offer any insightful take because we did not dig deep enough, and we write things with no applicable lesson. The 'so what?' mindset forces you to improve across these dimensions and will make your writing pertinent, insightful and engaging.
Pertinent: As you come up with an idea or question you want to answer, ask yourself 'So what? What are the implications of answering that question? How significant is the problem to my reader?'. The answer to this question is the promise_ of your piece, the gift you give your reader. To get meta, the pertinence of this piece is making you a better writer and thinker!
Insightful: Studying data science I've seen many data analyses. Most of them presented facts and figures that looked pretty, but few delivered insights. Their authors did not go all the way and give the implications of what they had discovered. This leads to unopinionated, complicated and overall uninteresting publications that could have otherwise been great pieces.
Action-oriented: Consultancies are famous for asking 'So what?' of their analysts all the time. Their concern is to ensure that facts, figures and opinions lead to actions and results. To make your writing more powerful and influential, go the extra mile in making it clear how should the reader go about doing what you've been writing about. There are few things as powerful as tips, tricks and hacks along with the principles or philosophy that bred them.
Our instincts are often right.
After 15 days of somewhat consecutive publishing, I realized my fears of writing poor essays were well-founded. I thought my essays would be irrelevant, uninsightful, and boring. It turns they are, like most things written online because I failed to ask myself the most important question.
So what?
The problem with our writing is that it often does not resonate with the people who read it, it often does not offer any insightful take because we did not dig deep enough, and we write things with no applicable lesson. The 'so what?' mindset forces you to improve across these dimensions and will make your writing pertinent, insightful and engaging.
Pertinent: As you come up with an idea or question you want to answer, ask yourself 'So what? What are the implications of answering that question? How significant is the problem to my reader?'. The answer to this question is the promise_ of your piece, the gift you give your reader. To get meta, the pertinence of this piece is making you a better writer and thinker!
Insightful: Studying data science I've seen many data analyses. Most of them presented facts and figures that looked pretty, but few delivered insights. Their authors did not go all the way and give the implications of what they had discovered. This leads to unopinionated, complicated and overall uninteresting publications that could have otherwise been great pieces.
Action-oriented: Consultancies are famous for asking 'So what?' of their analysts all the time. Their concern is to ensure that facts, figures and opinions lead to actions and results. To make your writing more powerful and influential, go the extra mile in making it clear how should the reader go about doing what you've been writing about. There are few things as powerful as tips, tricks and hacks along with the principles or philosophy that bred them.
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