by
Scott Kupor
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But there are other, larger lessons to glean as well. As you’ll learn in this book, most venture firms invest money on behalf of larger institutional asset managers, like university endowments and retirement funds. Most of these asset managers use a formula to determine how much money to allocate to different types of investments, including the high-risk, highly-illiquid sector of venture. (This approach to portfolio construction was pioneered by David Swensen at Yale, whose methods have been widely adopted, as you’ll read about in chapter 2). What that means is that the amount of resources our society currently invests in innovation is based on the percentage of assets that need to be invested according to this formula, rather than on the number of investable opportunities that exist. When too much money is chasing too few deals, there’s only one possible result: Because we have too few entrepreneurs, we can’t put enough money to work. Instead, it’s wasted on bidding up the prices of the few available assets rather than funding the kinds of organizations that are actually needed. The problem is even more pressing when you consider it from a diversity point of view. Not only are there not enough startups, but the ones that do exist aren’t nearly wide-ranging enough to build the kinds of companies our present and future call for. Possibly for the first time in history, we’re talent-constrained instead of capital-constrained. Scott’s book is an important step in making the opportunity to build a venture-scale business available to everyone so we can change that. The information about how to seek out and secure funding shouldn’t be limited to an elite club. Every startup is about a single idea, but taken together, all startups have a common purpose as well: to shape a better world for all of us. And a better world is one in which everyone is represented and served well by the companies and systems we create.
in other words: increasing financialisation creates increasing demand for 'entrepreneurship'
Entrepreneurship is inherently a risky endeavor, but it is absolutely essential to the American economy. Successful venture-backed companies have had an outsize positive impact on the US economy. According to a 2015 study by Ilya Strebulaev of Stanford University and Will Gornall of the University of British Columbia, 42 percent of all US company IPOs since 1974 were venture backed. Collectively, those venture-backed companies have invested $115 billion in research and development (R&D), accounting for 85 percent of all R&D spending, and created $4.3 trillion in market capitalization, which is 63 percent of the total market capitalization of public companies formed since 1974. Furthermore, specific to the impact on the American workforce, a 2010 study from the Kauffman Foundation found that young startups, most venture backed, were responsible for almost all of the twenty-five million net jobs created since 1977.
lol
I moved back to Silicon Valley to work for Lehman Brothers. Lehman, of course, was later a victim of the global financial crisis, suffering an ignominious bankruptcy in September 2008. My job at the time, in addition to being an all-around grunt, was to help life sciences companies raise capital, go public, and make acquisitions. Those were noble things to do, but for the fact that despite the raging bull market in technology in Silicon Valley, the investor appetite for life sciences was largely dormant.
was it??? a victim????
If you and I both think that Apple is a great stock to buy, we can both decide to buy it. Of course, if one of us is a really big buyer, the act of buying it might move the price such that my price might be different from yours (depending on which of us gets there first). But regardless, the general investment opportunity of buying Apple stock is available to each of us, independent of what the other does. The stock market is a democratic institution open to anyone who has money and a brokerage account.
hilarious
When Marc and Ben first started Andreessen Horowitz, they described this founder leadership capability as “egomaniacal.” Their theory—notwithstanding the choice of words—was that to make the decision to be a founder (a job fraught with likely failure), an individual needed to be so confident in her abilities to succeed that she would border on being so self-absorbed as to be truly egomaniacal. As you might imagine, the use of that term in our fund-raising deck for our first fund struck a chord with a number of our potential investors, who worried that we would back insufferable founders. We ultimately chose to abandon our word choice, but the principle remains today: you have to be partly delusional to start a company given the prospects of success and the need to keep pushing forward in the wake of the constant stream of doubters.
There is a story that Queen Isabella of Spain was the first true VC. She “backed” an entrepreneur (Christopher Columbus) with capital (money, ships, supplies, crew) to do something that most people at the time thought was insane and certain to fail (a voyage) in exchange for a portion of the to-be-earned profits of the voyage that, while probabilistically unlikely, had an asymmetric payoff compared to her at-risk capital.
If you attended Harvard Business School, you may have read about a similar early VC-like tale here in the States in the 1800s—the whaling industry. Financing a whaling venture was expensive and fraught with risk but, when successful, highly profitable. In 1840s New Bedford, “agents” (today’s VC equivalent) would raise capital from corporations and wealthy individuals (today’s limited partners) to fund ship captains (entrepreneurs) to launch a whaling venture (startup company) in search of asymmetric returns that were heavily skewed to the top agents, yet often plagued with failure. Thirty percent of voyages lost money . . . .
mask off moment lol
NICOLE EISENMAN, I NEED YOU TO MAKE A PICTURE
Nicole I saw you at the church and need your help. I think it's important to record relaxin's long term distortions. My legs are slightly bowed not from doing anything so that is immaterial.
What about this gappy thing between my thighs there is something wrong with my hips they are stuck or something, I mean they get stuck when I move so there is an arc in trying to move forward so that every forward movement involves a circle that was not there before. When I bend over completely in Prasarita Padottanasana like my groin is released in such a way like I feel the turning of a ball of the joint in such a way that I imagine my hip joints as padded with cork there is a softness such as was not there a soft hole that was not there in the groin which is related to the gappy hips. My boobs are ruined and ought to be painted as soon as possible as I cannot say whether they are ugly or beautiful; they are a ruin so how do you show that or what do you do about change of that nature where overnight you were one thing and then unimaginable punishments and then you were out of that even if you are not religious or a very small child I think you need a picture showing this kind of bodily rage although I admire certain aspects or angles of what I now see as the brutal indent of a formerly powerful ass. And the way I am eating which cannot be pictured but might be symbolically "pictured" or I pick up and secretly eat carbohydrates I load in ways previously revolting to me as my fear of obesity is intense everlasting earned. I think my digestion is ugly.
Returning to the privations of the past is tough despite years of trouble sacrifice of blood blisters under the toenails I sweated this muscle in the modern way with only moderate success. The limp is runner's knee.
DOG POEM
On this day 11 years ago my father died.
I watched him refuse death.
There was no reason to share this.
It was an indignity.
There is no refusing.
The brain stops even if until the last it performs miraculously the
duty of remaining illuminated.
He died on an evening like this warm one in November.
Loose leaves blew around the parking lot as I drove away from the
place of his death, a hospital.
I smoked with my mother's second sister just beyond the gate of the house my parents bought, owned and lived in together for twenty-six years.
I lived in that house, but did not live there then.
We smoked and a reporter came to the gate and asked her
questions.
She was ashamed.
There was no need to answer her.
We did not answer.
We smoked.
The night was strangely warm, like so many peculiar Halloweens,
November in just a few days.
Autumn quiets or casts itself between the warm parts of air.
It fills spaces of warmth with cold.
The poem is ... an organism or temporal machine, that, from the very start, strains toward its end. A kind of eschatology occurs within the poem itself. For the more or less brief time the poem lasts, it has a specific and unmistakable temporality, it has its own time.
— Georgio Agamben The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans
"There is a history of the embrace of degraded pleasure." What about the ways in which the R&B of my mind, today, is undermined by its own exuberant supplantation by the vulgar practice of Jay-Z— right-before-our-eyes capitalization of the value of black love and (of) hustle; he is a hedge fund. His vulgar practice is irrelevant to elaborating the love between us because it does not differentiate between transformative intimacy that is future-oriented and the consumable performance of black presence, which is always oriented toward what is already known about the black, all the symbolic causes of our danger. The vulgar practice is a fire-sale on the "all emotion" of the old R&B, trafficking in what Baraka views as the small-minded romantic hysteria of regular feeling (Beyonce's Lemonade) and peppers the old feelings, sweetens the deal, via performance of an emotional and affective repertoire that emerges from the time of rap mu-sic, alone. A terse awareness of the market value of the violence and isolation that gives our love its peculiarity. "The slave is the object to whom anything can be done, whose life can be squandered with impunity": the slave is "property of enjoyment." "I know that we the new slaves." [...]