Become a Venture Capitalist in Your Life

David Elikwu -

I'm borrowing a great framework from @dvassallo:

"Become a VC for your own ideas. Treat your ideas like cattle, not like pets." 🤯

Here's what it means for me:

In venture capital, the aim of the game is to build a fund that invests in ideas and generates massive profit.

But here's the catch - not every idea will make a 100x return.

If you're waiting for 5 perfect bets, you'll fall flat on your face.

Here's the napkin math - Instead of trying to make 5 perfect bets, make 50.

Decide as quickly as possible where to invest your efforts, but robustly enough not to be foolish.

Make 50 reasonable bets

30 might fail completely

10 might do ok

4 might be great

1 will be astronomical

Don't be too precious about each idea. Estimate its potential, test it out - release it into the wild.

Iterate quickly. Never get hung up on V1.

Don't just look for the Minimum Viable Product. Look for the Minimum Viable Test (h/t @gaganbiyani)

Here's another way to think about it using the rule of inversion:

Ask yourself: What's the worst possible version of this that could still be intelligible?

Find your '240p'

Fail fast and fail cheap.

Failure gets more expensive the more effort you put up front into making things perfect.

If you sink 4 months into a project just so it can fail the first time it sees the light of day, you've wasted too much time.

Learn as much as possible from each failure and change the variables every time. Try again - see what happens.

If you can, make failure so cheap you can fail twice in an afternoon and bounce back the next day.

I wrote more on this here:

42: How to fail exquisitely
The fine art of failure, and how to make it useful. Failure porn is everywhere. In a world of fortune cookie philosophers and Twitter entrepreneurs, rags (Harvard sweatshirt) to riches stories are in vogue. Founders want to share their story of raising a few million bucks. Everyone else wants the
The KnowledgeDavid Elikwu

When you see something working, double down.

This is the equivalent of VCs double-dipping on a solid startup by investing in subsequent rounds.

It's not time to bet the house yet. Just keep stacking your chips and levering up the bet.

The key thing to remember:

Don't waste time and energy trying to be perfect.

Make 50 reasonable bets

30 might fail completely

10 might do ok

4 might be great

1 will be astronomical