There is a trade-off between knowledge and action. Life consists of actions — choices we make and deeds we commit. Other things being equal, more and better knowledge will lead to better choices and actions in terms of better results and fewer mistakes (and regrets). However, acquiring knowledge takes time…

Alex Lazovsky of Scale-Up weighs in on the promise and pitfalls of NFTs for venture capital — (As recently published in Forbes) I’ll be the first to admit that it sometimes seems as if NFTs were invented to troll the tech community and VCs like me who finance it. The punchlines write themselves. Take this story: Cartoon pictures of anthropomorphic apes are selling for nearly $40 million…

VCs, their limited partners (i.e. fund investors), and startup founders are privileged in that they can actually treat each other as people. It would be nice if everyone treated everyone else as a person all the time, but that’s rarely the case. Most of the time, we’re all cogs in…

Why VC feels ambivalent about the convergence between public and private equity markets — (This is the unabridged version of Alex Lazovsky’s recent post on Forbes.) Many signs point to greater convergence between public and private markets, and venture capital has good reason to feel deeply ambivalent about their increasing similarity. …

As in dining, there is great variety in equity investing. Big institutional investors, like university endowment and pension funds, sometimes have their own investment staff. These are like live-in chefs. Every gigayacht should have three. Then there are the financial advisors in strip-malls hocking mass-market investment products on commission. They…

The US tech industry is the greatest capital extraction machine since the spice trade — The geographic distribution of the global tech industry is peculiar. The USA is responsible for about 33% of the value of the technology business worldwide, but only about 4% of the world’s population lives in there. …

Sequoia, one of the most illustrious VC firms, recently announced a momentous change to how they structure their fund(s) and their business. Some claim that “Sequoia Capital will no longer be a venture capital firm,” others claim that it is “blowing up the VC fund structure,” and of course no…

There basically four reasons to entrust your money to any professional investor: Sheer charisma — whenever the person talks, you suddenly can’t imagine not giving them your money, but you can’t say exactly what it is about them. Of course, that’s almost certainly a scam. Access — this person golfs…

(The full version of Alex Lazovsky’s recent Forbes piece.) When I heard that Shaq and Ciara were sponsoring SPACs, I was worried. It looked like a beloved financial vehicle was jumping the shark. But Warren Buffett reassured me. When he called SPACs “a killer” for his business because they were…