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Author: Pirque

Last edited: 16 May 2022

Date Published	Title	Type	Author	Quick Synopsis	Link
2012-04-16	Acqui-Hiring	Literature/Paper	John F. Coyle,Gregg D. Polsky	A paper offering one of the first formal-description on the acqui-hire phenomenon.	https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2040924
2011-04-24	Something Ventured	Documentary	Paul Holland,Molly Davis	Documentary on the creation of the US venture capital industry.	https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/amzn1.dv.gti.26a9f78b-8110-80d2-f2e1-52b014abaa16
	US VC genealogy	Graphic	Jerry Neumann	Mapping of VC firms, their founders, and some of their most interesting investments.	http://neuvc.com/labs/vcgenealogy/
2005-01-01	On Bullshit	Book	Harry Frankfurt	One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it.	https://amzn.to/2uaX1d1
2014-09-16	Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future	Book	Peter Thiel	The great secret of our time is that there are still uncharted frontiers to explore and new inventories to create.	https://amzn.to/2K2Cy5a
2014-03-04	The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers	Book	Ben Horowitz	Ben Horowitz, cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz and one of Silicon Valley's most respected and experienced entrepreneurs, offers essential advice on building and running a startup—practical wisdom for managing the toughest problems business school doesn’t cover, based on his popular ben’s blog.	https://amzn.to/2MbRH0D
1968-11-01	The Money Men - Is Even U.S. Steel Safe?	Article		Forbes article from 1-nov-68 on the rise of Arthur Rock, VC’s founding father.	https://docsend.com/view/vmxghmq
2012-10-12	The Men Who Built America	Documentary		Miniseries on how the industrial innovations of Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan, and Ford built the first American business empires.	https://www.history.com/shows/men-who-built-america
2008-11-20	The Secret History of Silicon Valley	Deck/Memo/Presentation	Steve Blank	Talk on the creation of Silicon Valley, as an entrepreneurial ecosystem.	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo
2002-10-01	Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages	Book	Carlota Perez	It was Carlota Perez in the early 1980s, who designated the major changes in technology systems, such as mechanization, electrification or computerization, as "changes of techno-economic paradigm" a designation which has since been widely adopted.	https://amzn.to/2MdDcJO
2017-12-05	A Dozen Lessons for Entrepreneurs	Book	Tren Griffin	A Dozen Lessons for Entrepreneurs shows how the insights of leading venture capitalists can teach readers to create a unique approach to building a successful business. Through profiles and interviews of figures such as Bill Gurley of Benchmark Capital, Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz of Andreesen Horowitz, and Jenny Lee of GGV Capital, Tren Griffin draws out the fundamental lessons from their ideas and experiences. Entrepreneurs should learn from past successes but also be prepared to break new ground.	https://amzn.to/2tlpKwq
2012-03-01	The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company	Book	Steve Blank	More than 100,000 entrepreneurs rely on this book for detailed, step-by-step instructions on building successful, scalable, profitable startups. The National Science Foundation pays hundreds of startup teams each year to follow the process outlined in the book, and it's taught at Stanford, Berkeley, Columbia and more than 100 other leading universities worldwide. Why?	https://amzn.to/2ttYvif
2011-09-13	The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses	Book	Eric Ries	Most startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched.	https://amzn.to/2yyhOg6
2019-12-01	Startup Growth and Venture Returns	Report	Abraham Othman	We use AngelList data from thousands of early-stage venture investments to solve for how each successive year of a startup’s existence affects investment returns. This allows us to create a model of how quickly winning venture investments grow and how that rate of growth decays. Our model shows that at the seed stage investors would increase their expected return by broadly indexing into every credible deal, a finding that does not hold at later stages. Our results also suggest that startups staying private longer have created a powerful engine for unbounded wealth creation entirely outside the public markets; we conclude with an argumentrootedinsocialequityforwhyretailinvestorsshouldhaveaccesstoabroad-basedindexofearlystage venture investments.	https://angel.co/blog/venture-returns
	Cheatsheet: Investing Landscape	Deck/Memo/Presentation	Pirque	1-pager on where/how to play. 1-pager on risks involved.	https://docsend.com/view/7ee3h9n
1972-09-01	Faces Behind the Figures - Money's the Least of It	Article	Georges Doriot	Brief article about Georges Doriot v Wall St. "I don't know anyone on Wall Street who ever built a company. They simply furnish money, and that's the least important part of it."	https://docsend.com/view/xydedm9hvx8jjg95
2015-09-01	Blitzscaling: Class Notes and Essays	Database/List/Ranking	Chris McCann,Chris Yeh	The official collection for Stanford’s CS183C: Technology-enabled Blitzscaling.	https://medium.com/cs183c-blitzscaling-class-collection
2008-03-11	Creative Capital: Georges Doriot and the Birth of Venture Capital	Book	Spencer Ante	In Creative Capital, Spencer Ante tells the compelling story of the enigmatic and quirky man--Georges Doriot--who created the venture capital industry. The author traces the pivotal events in Doriot's life, including his experience as a decorated brigadier general during World War II; as a maverick professor at Harvard Business School; and as the architect and founder of the first venture capital firm, American Research and Development.	https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1422101223
2012-06-01	The Struggle	Essay/Thoughts/Whitepaper/Opinion	Ben Horowitz	Start a company? If you need inspiring words, you should not do it.	https://docsend.com/view/j2tbxan
2021-06-01	The Network Effects Manual: 13 Different Network Effects (and counting)	Essay/Thoughts/Whitepaper/Opinion	James Currier	A manual that communicates the importance, variety, and complexity of network effects.	https://www.nfx.com/post/network-effects-manual
2018-11-01	Breaking into VC	Essay/Thoughts/Whitepaper/Opinion	Erik Torenberg	A 2-pager explaining some of the key value-add skills of a VC.	https://docsend.com/view/mw8e4g6
1983-12-31	West Coast Venture Capital	Graphic	AMC	Chart mapping 25 years of the people and companies that set the modern venture capital industry.	https://computerhistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/110C9228-Edit.jpg
2020-08-04	Public to Private Equity in the United States: A Long-Term Look	Literature/Paper	Michael J. Mauboussin,Dan Callanhan	· The equity capitalization of the U.S stock market is roughly 27 times the size of AUM for buyout funds and more than 80 times the size of venture capital funds. · There are about 3,600 public companies in the U.S. today, about one-half as many as there were in 1996 and three-quarters as many as there were in 1976. · Further, companies have raised more money in private markets than in public markets in each year since 2009. For example, companies raised $3.0 trillion in private markets and $1.5 trillion in public markets in 2017.3 These changes in how investors invest and how companies raise capital have important implications for holding periods, the perceived volatility of the returns, and liquidity. · The right panel of exhibit 11 shows that university endowments, which collectively control assets of more than $600 billion, have undergone an even bigger shift. · The pattern in asset allocation that we have seen is consistent with the search for returns. The left panel of exhibit 11 shows that a large sample of state and local government pension funds in the U.S., with total assets estimated to be $4.5 trillion, · Return dispersion, the difference between the best and worst funds, is very wide in private equity relative to other asset classes. Venture capital dispersion is higher than that of buyouts, but both are high. That means the ability to identify and gain access to skillful general partners is crucial. Research shows that skill in fund selection is a significant determinant of returns and that access to the best managers was key to the success of endowments such as Stanford and MIT. The leaders have done better than the followers.35 · First, the capital is locked up for a period of time, which limits the ability to buy high and sell low. Second, the smoothed returns provide a perception of stability that may offset the tendency to overreact to short-term losses. · Increasing returns are pronounced in intangible-based businesses, and there has been a growing gap between the intangible spending of the large firms relative to small ones. · The propensity to list is roughly one-half of what it was in the mid-1990s · For example, the average market capitalization of a public company in 1976, measured in 2019 dollars, was $686 million. By 1996, that average grew to just under $1.8 billion. Today, the average market capitalization is nearly $10.4 billion · There is debate about whether the size effect, a factor that reflects the fact that small-capitalization stocks deliver higher returns than the capital asset pricing model indicates, has remained intact as the number of stocks has dropped. · Only about 10 percent of funds charge less than 20 percent for the profit share, or carried interest, component of fees. · In addition, a number of marketplaces, including SharesPost, Forge, EquityZen, NASDAQ Private Market, ClearList, and Carta, provide liquidity for sellers and buyers. About one-half of private companies surveyed allow their employees to sell shares. · The sunlight of an IPO can be the best of disinfectants from overvaluation and can improve productivity · We saw that the expected returns were lower for large buyout funds that followed smaller funds. The same is true for venture capital, but the effect is even more pronounced.15 · As exhibit 44 suggests, every 1 percent shift in asset allocation from public to private equities represents about $390 billion in assets. For context, the commitment to U.S. buyouts and venture capital were approximately $315 billion in 2019. · In reality, flows often mirror past returns. Investors do in the present what they should have done years before. · As with most corners of the investment world, there will be pressure on fees for many buyout and venture capital firms.173 Similar to active managers of public equities, firms that demonstrate skill will be able to charge above-average fees. But investors will likely challenge the lower tier of the industry to lower fees.	https://www.morganstanley.com/im/publication/insights/articles/articles_publictoprivateequityintheusalongtermlook_us.pdf
2007-07-24	Making Silicon Valley: Innovation and the Growth of High Tech, 1930-1970	Book	Christophe Lecuyer	In Making Silicon Valley, Christophe Lécuyer shows that the explosive growth of the personal computer industry in Silicon Valley was the culmination of decades of growth and innovation in the San Francisco-area electronics industry. Using the tools of science and technology studies, he explores the formation of Silicon Valley as an industrial district, from its beginnings as the home of a few radio enterprises that operated in the shadow of RCA and other East Coast firms through its establishment as a center of the electronics industry and a leading producer of power grid tubes, microwave tubes, and semiconductors.	https://www.amazon.com/Making-Silicon-Valley-Innovation-Technology/dp/0262622114
2017-12-03	Power Laws in Venture Portfolio Construction	Essay/Thoughts/Whitepaper/Opinion	Jerry Neumann	A step by step model to show the effect of the power law in venture portfolio construction.	http://reactionwheel.net/2017/12/power-laws-in-venture-portfolio-construction.html
2022-02-01	The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future	Book	sebastian mallaby	From the New York Times bestselling author of More Money Than God comes the astonishingly frank and intimate story of Silicon Valley’s dominant venture-capital firms—and how their strategies and fates have shaped the path of innovation and the global economy	https://www.amazon.com/Power-Law-Venture-Capital-Making/dp/052555999X