Venture Capital takes advantage of power-law distribution, should the Department of Defense?
Here is venture investor Steve Kim on data-driven insights from the Venture Stories podcast. We model that 30% of the startups that we invest in […]
venture stories
DoD’s end-to-end budget cycle must be compressed to one year, max
Here’s a lengthy slice from the recently exited DIU director Michael Brown on the Venture Stories podcast discussing a major barrier to military innovation. I’ll […]
How the geometry of investing in defense startups is different
Here’s a few slices from a great Venture Stories podcast with Alex Moore, an investor at 8VC and before that he was one of the […]
How the China narrative may be changing
Right now, there’s this strong narrative that China’s government can do no wrong. China is unstoppable juggernaut. This view is about eight years out of […]
Talent, resource allocation, and SpaceX
Here is an excerpt from entrepreneur and VC Daniel Gross talking with Tyler Cowen about their new book, Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and […]
Is the US military in a bubble, unfit for attrition warfare?
If you look back historically, there are very few situations where one side has a big enough technology advantage that it actually causes a win-loss […]
The investment thesis behind Anduril
Here’s Katherine Boyle from General Catalyst talking on the Venture Stories podcast about her rationale being funding Anduril in the early days: Anduril’s a company […]
Does DoD turn out good product managers?
You mentioned intuition and I think that can be developed too believe it or not. I’ve helped many product managers develop their product sense. How […]
Military capabilities are not well represented by DoD budgets
Here is fellow emergent ventures recipient Alexey Gurzey on the Venture Stories podcast talking about the declining relevance of GDP: If you think about someone […]
Throw out the linear model of innovation for tinkering at the frontiers
One of the posts I wrote was a case study of the transistor. The transistor was invested at Bell Labs in the semiconductor research group. […]
Gov’t funding is short-term, project-based, risk-averse, and prone to groupthink
One hypothesis I’d like to investigate is that we’ve gotten a little too centralized and monolithic in our funding. That is something to address. The […]
Views on US-China tensions, preparedness, and the great decoupling
Tech companies with operations in both China and the United States are increasingly struggling to comply with values and laws that are systemically in conflict. […]
The importance of sales & marketing in commercial go-to-market
Let’s say you’re at $50 million ARR [annual recurring revenue] and your peer group on average grows at 80 percent. That means your peer group […]
How shared equipment dramatically lowers barriers to deep tech R&D
In the same way that AWS dramatically lowered the bar to start a software company, you’re seeing the same thing of multiple labs-as-a-service companies that […]
Complexity science, “if-then” propositions, and how to make decisions
I’m interested in complexity science, which, if you’re actually doing complexity science, it releases complexity. For example, in real complexity science, there’s an issue with […]