How to win by adding labor back in to your business

Regular readers know that I'm obsessed with the Future of Work -- a catch-all phrase for the many ways in which the global labor markets are being reshaped by technology.

One visible element of this trend is the acute scarcity of digital creative talent, creating what I call "The Maker Moment"-- the current golden opportunity for people who possess those skills to both create and capture a disproportionate share of value in the global economy. (I've also invested directly in this theme by backing GroupTalent, a "CAA for digital creatives").

The darker side of this trend is the ongoing structural displacement of workers who lack skills relevant to the digital economy. 

After several friends recommended it to me, I finally sat down yesterday to read Race Against the Machine by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee. 

The book is a short, lucid read that perfectly captures the disconnect between traditional labor market analysis -- which assumes that we're in a cyclical labor downturn stemming from the 2008 crash -- and what's actually happening: a permanent reshaping of the labor markets by technology, in which an increasing number of job roles are simply being replaced by technological substitutes, never to return.

At a macro level, this trend has serious and scary implications for the future of the global economy and civil society: a world in which population grows and job opportunities shrink is one likely to experience significant hardship and social unrest.

While I don't see any obvious macro solutions to this trend, I do think there are some near-term opportunities to create job roles that -- while far from replacing previous full-time / high-wage employment -- do create the potential for meaningful work and earnings for participants in the digital economy who lack hardcore technical skills.

Lately I've found myself recommending to my portfolio companies that they add labor back in to their service offering.

I know this advice may seem odd to many of my peers in the startup community, but it's not -- or at least not primarily -- motivated by my concern for the health of the labor markets. Rather, it's based on repeated observations of scale constraints in traditional Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business models, combined with steady innovation in, and acceptance of, Talent-as-a-Service labor platforms.

As an early-stage investor I work with dozens of developer-led organizations that begin their entrepreneurial journey with an almost pathological fear of human inputs to their business models; the tacit product vision for most of these companies, at least at inception, is the "AdWords dream" of customer self-service with no human-to-human interaction required.

This approach can carry a company a surprisingly long way, especially if they primarily sell to other developers. Atlassian -- a provider of cloud-based process management tools for software engineers -- is constantly promoting the fact that they've grown their business to over $100MM in revenues without hiring human salespeople.

But for most SaaS businesses -- and any that cater to the needs of non-technical customers -- Google's success with self-service at scale is a dangerous illusion.

The economic magic of the software industry -- which is what attracts capitalists like me to the business in the first place -- is its unique ability to support massively accelerating margins at scale by replacing labor inputs with machine intelligence. Each incremental customer for a SaaS business should -- at least theoretically -- only add pennies to your monthlyAWS bill but be worth tens, or hundreds, or even thousands of dollars of incremental revenue a month.

The problem with this theory is that most customers actually prefer to interact with humans to solve business problems, at least some of the time. A business that requires all customer interactions to be handled by machines can defend its margins, but only with an attendant loss in customer intimacy. This can work fine for routine / low risk interactions like online shopping (think Amazon.com)...

But when the service provided is new, complex, and/or strategically important to the customer, insisting that all interactions be handled through the browser virtually guarantees that the business won't scale.

Ten years ago this problem was most often solved by hiring full-time sales and support people to handle  complex customer interactions. And this is still a valid approach for business models with long sales cycles and very high customer lifetime values.

But this approach doesn't really work for for the new generation of highly capital-efficient tech startups. Venture investors are quick to dismiss business models that rely too heavily on labor inputs as "services, not products", and lean / agile approaches to company development demand small teams that can adjust quickly to changes in market dynamics.

So how can an ambitious, fast-growing SaaS business hope to win by adding labor back in to their business model?

There's no single right answer to this question, but many encouraging alternative models are currently being explored by companies in sectors as diverse as online advertising (e.g, Trada), local services (e.g, TaskRabbit), and lifestyle retail (e.g, Stella + Dot).

To me, Trada is the most interesting of these because it attaches a labor-based service offering to the most self-service of all digital offerings: keyword advertising.

Trada's insight is that running an effective keyword advertising campaign requires significant human expertise. These skills are relatively new and most companies don't have in-house experts on staff. But rather than create a traditional consulting services business, Trada created a specialty labor market for keyword advertising entrepreneurs. Customers specify a target cost-per acquisition and set a budget, and entrepreneurs working on the Trada platform use their skill to acquire customers for less than the target cost, keeping the difference as compensation for their expertise (after Trada takes a cut for being the platform provider, of course).

The key insight -- which can be applied by almost any SaaS business targeting high-value work processes -- is to attach a contingent labor marketplace to your software platform that turns a DIY (do-it-yourself) offering into a DIFM (do-it-for-me) one.

This approach is made possible by the accelerating, technology-powered disaggregation of the labor market -- there are fewer full-time jobs available in enterprise, and more smart people willing to work in non-traditional ways that allow them to apply and/or develop marketable skills.

If you squint a little, it's actually not hard to envision a future in which most professional work takes place in these kinds of technology-assisted labor markets -- with tasks put out to bid and compensation based, at least in part, on quantifiable job performance.

A quote from Race Against the Machine sums this future state up perfectly:

"The key to winning the race is not to compete against the machines but to compete with the machines."

This isn't just good labor policy, it's good business.

Geekwire Awards Keynote: Turtles + Flywheels

The crew at GeekWire -- Seattle's leading tech media + events platform -- invited me to keynote this year's Seattle Startup Awards. My notes for the speech are reproduced below (the picture is by Adam Loving) -- the same content, plus a video of the speech, can be found on GeekWire:

I want to talk to you tonight about two things: 

• Turtles
• And flywheels

Some of you may have heard the story about the Hindu wise man who explained to a child that the earth rested on the back of an elephant. 

"But," the child asked him, "what does the elephant stand on?“

“A tortoise” replied the wise man. 

“And what does the tortoise stand on?” the child asked again

“Another tortoise” replied the wise man

This went on for some time until finally the wise man finally got frustrated and said: “Stop asking child, it’s turtles all the way down!”

To me, this is the perfect metaphor for a startup ecosystem. 

When I was right out of college and trying to figure out what to do with my life, I thought I was supposed to get a job at some big company. And somehow I found myself living in Florida and working for AT&T, which had something like 350,000 employees at the time. And my part of the company was basically a credit card business, which is really a pretty sleazy business.

And I hated everything about it.

And I thought to myself, I’m clearly doing this wrong.

So I quit.

And I moved back to Seattle to work on a startup of Craig McCaw’s and it was like Alice in Wonderland when she goes down the rabbit hole. There were all these young guys running around just making it up as they went along, raising all kinds of money from the junk debt market and trying all kinds of crazy ideas. 

And this was also about the time that the time the Mosaic browser came out -- and I remember subscribing to Wired magazine right when it first started and my brain was just exploding.

Because what I had discovered was that a company wasn’t some static, permanent thing that you had to fit yourself into, but a thing that anyone could make, and could change -- even I could change it.

And I spent the next 15 years of my life learning how to start businesses.

Sometimes I did it inside existing companies, and sometimes from scratch. Sometimes my partners and I financed them with credit cards and sometimes with venture money. And sometimes they worked and sometimes they didn’t.

But no matter how they turned out, I loved the work. I loved the people and the culture. And I knew I was wrecked forever as an employee and I’d never be able to do anything else but be an entrepreneur.

Then, about five years ago my business partner Andy Sack and I figured out that instead of doing one startup at a time we could actually build a startup that built startups, and we created Founders Co-op do do exactly that.

In the last five years we’ve invested in over 40 companies in the region. Those companies have gone on to raise more than $140 million in additional VC money.

But as I’ve learned what it means to be a startup investor, I’ve also realized that a startup to build startups can’t really be successful if the broader community it operates in isn’t also growing and developing.

So -- in addition to my day job at Founders Co-op -- I’ve tried to figure out how to help make that happen, and it’s led me to all kinds of places I never expected to go. The announcement today about the City of Seattle’s “Startup Seattle” initiative is just one example of what that looks like, and I’m proud to have played a small part in that story.

You see where this is going, right?

The startup community is just like that story about the elephant -- it’s turtles all the way down. 

Whether you’re making your first leap from a corporate job to a startup job; or starting your first company as a founder; or you’re a serial entrepreneur who’s mentoring and investing in other people; or you’re Jeff Bezos, who’s in the process of reshaping huge chunks of the global economy; or you’re Bill Gates, who did the same thing and then took everything he learned as an entrepreneur -- and most of the money he made -- and is now trying to make the whole world a better place.

If you’re here tonight, you’re part of an extended community of people who weren’t content to take the world as they found it, but stepped outside the system to try their hand at making it better, or different -- more interesting, or more fun.

The startup community is the most welcoming and positive community I’ve ever been a part of. And once you’re in it, even as your role changes over time you just keep finding new ways to do work that matters to you, and to make the change you want to see in the world.

We’re all so busy that don’t often take time to think about how our work relates to the work of others in the community. Which brings me to my second topic... Flywheels

A flywheel is a store of energy -- the more energy you put into it, the more power it has. And the more massive it is, the more energy it can store, and the harder it is to stop.

For any one of us, on any given day, it can sometimes be hard to see how our individual effort amounts to anything. But when you start to string days together into years, and you look back, you can see how far you’ve come, and how much you’ve accomplished.

The truth is, it takes time to build anything of lasting value:

• Our identities as people
• Our role in the world
• Our companies
• The communities we live in and contribute to

The better something is -- the more powerful and lasting -- the longer it takes to build.

I grew up in Seattle in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and I remember what it was like before Microsoft, before Amazon. I graduated from high school in 1986 -- the year Microsoft went public -- and I left for the East Coast, and then the Bay Area, and then Florida.

I came back in the early ‘90s to work at McCaw until AT&T bought us, and then went back to California. And then I finally came back for good about a dozen years ago, and have been hammering away at my little corner of the local startup ecosystem ever since.

We often wring our hands about all the ways in which our community is less than other places -- fewer startups, less money, fewer big wins to our credit. I do this too.

But when I zoom out -- with the perspective of those 25 years, and having lived and worked in some of those other cities we compare ourselves to -- I can tell you with absolute certainty that we have built a flywheel of incredible mass, and that flywheel is spinning faster and faster.

Every single one of you in this room makes up some portion of that mass. And the energy that you expend each day -- on your own growth, on the work of your companies, and as a participant in our broader community -- makes that wheel spin just a little bit faster.

We are all of us, together, the co-founders of the Pacific Northwest’s startup community -- from Portland down south, right through up to Vancouver. And the thing we’re building together is already one of the massive flywheels of the global economy. And we’re just getting started

I want to thank Geekwire for being the convener + storyteller of our community and bringing us all together tonight to celebrate that work.

And I want to thank each of you for the work you do -- every day -- to build + spin that wheel

Thank you, and on with the show!

Software eats the organization

Marc Andreesen's battle cry -- software is eating the world -- is true at both the macro and the micro level. As organizations become increasingly software- and data-powered, software development practices have escaped from IT to become organization- and process-design principles for the entire enterprise.

This point was driven home for me this week by Steve Blank's funny and self-deprecating post. "When Hell Froze Over - in the Harvard Business Review". In his (understated) words:

"The techniques invented in what has become the Lean Startup movement are now more than ever applicable to reinventing the modern corporation."

This shift from top-down / waterfall business and product planning to the iterative, customer-centric lean / agile approach has unfolded at blistering speed -- much faster than most large organizations have been able to cope with.

While thought leaders like Blank (and now HBR) have slowly won converts at the top of the organizational pyramid, line workers have led the first wave of culture change from below -- aided by SaaS vendors who have made it easy (and cheap) to adopt lean practices at the departmental level.

When an individual contributor in a big company can improve his or her odds of success by adopting a lightweight SaaS product -- whether in CRM, bug tracking, digital marketing or cross-team collaboration -- the first cracks appear in the dam.

And when entire departments -- and then cross-departmental teams -- shift big chunks of organizational workflow to these tools -- the dam is fully breached and organizational change must follow.

If it doesn't -- either because management doesn't get it or IT won't allow it (two symptoms of the same disease) -- these intrapreneurs will start looking for roles in more forward-looking organizations where their efforts are more likely to be rewarded.

This shift from waterfall to lean organization design is most visible at technology-driven companies like Amazon.com. Steve Yegge's controversial (and now redacted) blog post about the company's then-radical move to a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) made a much larger point about the cultural change that followed:

Amazon's org design mirrors its engineering design; it is cellular, autonomous, measurement-driven and accountable down to the team and project level.

This kind of change comes less naturally to organizations where IT is viewed as a necessary evil, a collection of nerds tucked away under the CFO organization and kept out of sight while the real heroes of the business go about their important work. And unfortunately for those organizations, the dawning realization that software is actually the heart of the business will probably come too late.

But for the great mass of organizations -- big or small,  for-profit or non-profit -- which are neither technology-adept nor technology-averse, the moment to embrace "software" practices like Lean and Agile as core organizational principles is right now. The ideas are free and the tools are cheap, but the ability to build an organization that survives and thrives in a software-powered future is priceless.

"Exercise Your Options in Washington"

I was chatting with a startup lawyer here in Seattle the other day about California's recent income tax changes and their potential impact -- both real and psychological -- on how high-performing startup founders think about where to build their next company.

I'm mostly a tax policy skeptic when it comes to entrepreneurial decision-making; in my experience, success-oriented founders build their companies wherever they think they'll be most likely to win, and the local tax burden is considered not at all in their decision-making process.

But the recent level of angst among California entrepreneurs -- and the growing trickle of income tax refugees I've met who have relocated their families to Seattle in the past year -- has me questioning my assumptions this time.

I don't think Seattle needs to get all Texas about it, but we should be proud of how founder-friendly our local culture and policy environment really is -- and we shouldn't be shy about sharing the facts with our entrepreneurial friends down south.

My lawyer friend suggested a tagline for this non-existent founder recruiting campaign: "Exercise your options in Washington"

OK, so it may not be pure marketing genius, but it gets the point across.

If you hate the tagline but like the idea, feel free to weigh in below -- or shoot me an email -- with your suggestions. I'm at least half-serious about this, and if the broader community gets behind it I can think of a half-a-dozen ways to turn up the volume.

Creative commons image at top by: manleyaudio

Embrace the mess

This post first appeared on Medium.com

Startup culture fetishizes simplicity.

In products, business models and founder narratives, points are given for clean lines and beveled edges, and deducted for rough spots, long explanations and run-on sentences.

Blame Steve Jobs, or @ev, for that matter — for creating this beautiful lie. Just don’t let their considerable magicians’ gifts keep you from spotting the machinery underneath.

I get sucked in myself. I’m an early-stage investor in part because I love the purity of a clean slate: just a couple of brilliant founders with a huge idea and no messy baggage to drag along.

But the older I get, the more I’ve come to appreciate a good mess.

Take Mark Suster’s recent (and excellent) series on the critical role of professional services in enterprise software. How many great young companies have failed to achieve meaningful scale because they drank too deeply from the 37signals Kool-Aid jug? How did the fallacy of “self-service” enterprise software become accepted as gospel by so many talented young entrepreneurs?

Managing people is messy. Humans don’t scale.

And yet the Goliaths of enterprise software all achieved dominance via small armies of consultants and “customer success teams”, who made sure that initial decision to buy metastasized into an ever-deeper commitment to the platform.

No, it’s not always pretty. Incentives get misaligned. Bad behavior sometimes follows. But taking humans out of the equation isn’t a solution, it’s a dodge.

Leadership is a solution. Values are a solution. Embrace the mess.

Here’s another example, a little closer to home (for me, at least): running a seed fund. I’ve spent the past five years learning the basics of early-stage investing. Find great founders, write them checks, how hard is that, right?

But every day I peel the onion a little more.

To run money you have to raise money. How do you do that? To find great teams you have to see hundreds — make that thousands — of not-so-great ones. How do you do that? You see more and better deals if you have a stronger local ecosystem. How do you build one of those?

What began as a simple life of founder meetings and startup hustle is now a tangle of tasks and commitments I couldn’t have imagined when I set out. Not just the obvious-in-restrospect stuff like fundraising and LP communications, but many, many more loosely-coupled activities: supporting accelerator programs, speaking and writing, volunteering on industry trade groups and government commissions, mentoring new investors and seeking advice from veterans so I don’t have to make every mistake from scratch.

It’s a mess. I love every minute of it. And — slowly, very slowly — it is making me more effective at the simple task that sits at the center: finding amazing people and helping them win.

Simple isn’t the opposite of complex, it’s just an elegant (and wrenchingly difficult-to-achieve) misdirection that tucks complexity out of sight.

Messy is interesting. Messy is valuable. Embrace the mess.

Microsoft, Amazon and the "Resource Curse"

For the past week or so I've been devouring -- and hugely enjoying -- Daniel Yergin's comprehensive survey of the energy business, from the first oil strike in Pennsylvania, through the energy crises of the '70's and '90's up to the present era of fracking and (once again) abundant fossil fuels (natural gas this time around).

There's much to learn about the complex relationships among technology, capitalism, state governments and consumer demand in the book, but one parallel to the tech industry jumped out at me immediately: the paradox of "Dutch Disease" (also known as the "resource curse"); here's Wikipedia's definition of the latter:

"[T]he paradox that countries and regions with an abundance of natural resources, specifically point-source non-renewable resources like mineral and fuels, tend to have less economic growth and worse development outcomes than countries with fewer natural resources."

I can't read that sentence without thinking about the sharply divergent cultures and strategic arcs of two remarkable companies: Microsoft and Amazon.

Microsoft could be the tech industry poster child for the resource curse -- a company seemingly blessed with a massively profitable and "sticky" core franchise (Windows + Office), but that has failed for over a decade to deploy that wealth productively in support of new initiatives.

Even the way the company prosecutes innovation -- dumping billions into late-mover attempts to imitate industry leaders (Apple and Google most notably), or grossly overpaying for "strategic" acquisitions that somehow fail to thrive post-deal (e.g., Avenue A / Aquantive, Skype, Yammer) -- seems to reflect a misplaced faith in overwhelming force over persistent excellence as the decisive factor in any given strategic battle.

Amazon, by contrast, is the company Wall Street analysts love to hate, because it keeps eroding its own operating margins with price cuts and reinvesting every spare nickel of free cash flow in new ideas instead of sensibly parking profits in offshore tax havens. A casual observer might accuse Jeff Bezos of deliberately starving the organization of resources, paying his people too little and working them too hard to attract and retain great talent.

And yet... seen through the lens of the resource curse, Amazon's thin margins and culture of permanent scarcity look like pure management genius.

How do you run a $60 Billion business where every employee still treats company money like it was their own, works like a dog and holds themselves and their peers to insanely high standards of excellence and output? Apparently, you never rest on your laurels, constantly harvest profitable lines of business to feed ever-faster cycles of innovation in new ones, and keep placing bets on the future without regard to competitors, Wall Street or anyone else.

This is -- of course -- a grossly unfair and ill-informed oversimplification of a much more complex and dynamic strategic situation facing two very different companies which grew up in two very different eras in tech. And there's nothing I'd rather see -- for the good of Seattle's ecosystem as much as for the company and its people -- than for Microsoft to re-emerge as a leader and innovator. But it may require a sharp and scary erosion of Microsoft's core revenue franchises -- triggering a real fight for survival -- for the company to shake off the torpor of abundance and regain its fighting form.

P.S. -- Google is the next in line to suffer from the resource curse -- their core search advertising franchise is the magic cash machine that feeds their culture of abundance -- but so far they've done a better job of deploying that cash against genuine innovation that matters (Gmail, Google Maps, Android, Google Docs) than Microsoft. Only time will tell, but the realist in me thinks that the resource curse will eventually erode that culture's competence from the inside out no matter how well the leaders play their cards.

Steve Jobs was right when he said "stay hungry, stay foolish" -- too much of a good thing never turns out well.

What is a non-Valley seed fund good for?

We all want to believe that our work matters -- that the 50 or 60 or 100 hours a week we spend away from our families actually makes a difference in our professional community and, if we're lucky, in the wider world.

As a self-taught venture investor -- Andy and I started Founders' Co-op five years ago, after nearly 20 years as entrepreneur/operators -- I'm always testing my assumptions about the role I believe I can play in the innovation community, and the meaning I want that work to make in my own life and the lives of others.

This post is a public unpacking of those assumptions, and an invitation for anyone who cares about these topics to challenge my thinking and make it stronger.

Like many entrepreneurs, we started Founders' Co-op on a hunch -- really a pooled set of observations from our experience as founders in two more-established startup markets (Boston for Andy, SF/Bay Area for me) who had moved to Seattle and together started a venture-backed company here.

Our original thesis was very simple and went something like this:

• Seattle's a great city with a ton of software engineering talent -- mainly because of the massive entrepreneurial successes of Microsoft and Amazon.
• For some reason all that success, money and talent hasn't translated into a very active or high-performing startup scene.
• It's kind of a bummer to be an entrepreneur in a city that doesn't have a strong culture of entrepreneurship.
• We're here, we like working together and we want to build something cool -- maybe we could do some good, *and* make some money -- by trying to change that.

Today -- five years in -- that simple set of ideas is still the animating spirit behind what we do. 

But along the way we've learned a ton about what it really means to run a seed-stage fund -- from raising capital and sourcing deals to managing a growing portfolio of companies through both success and failure. (Taking on TechStars Seattle in 2010 accelerated our learning about fund management at least as much it has helped the participating teams).

In the same half-decade, the entire venture capital industry has been buffeted by a series of changes, some cyclical and some more fundamental: poor aggregate financial performance, collapsing startup costs and the resulting emergence of a new, pre-venture tier of company formation and financing. The current "Series A crunch" is just the latest symptom of these changes, and the anticipated Federal approval of startup crowdfunding will be yet another disruptor of the established patterns for innovation finance.**

Our ongoing journey as professional investors -- cross-threaded with the accelerating changes in our operating environment -- has led us to a much deeper understanding of the opportunity we intuited five years ago:

We now think we know what a non-Valley seed fund is good for, and we're hell-bent on filling that role in a way that makes us uniquely relevant to the entrepreneurs and investors we work with.

This post is already deep into tl;dr-land so I won't attempt to itemize the entire catalog of observations, personal mistakes, wise counsel from others and accidental insights that produced this view (though I'm happy to get into all of that 1:1 if you're interested). Instead, I'm just going to make a series of assertions about our evolutionary niche in the current landscape of software innovation:

As a non-Valley seed fund, our mission is to scout extraordinary founding teams currently operating outside the Bay Area and help them build businesses that the best venture capital investors in the world want to back.

This mission is informed by the following beliefs about high-performing (i.e., "venture-grade") software innovation:

1. Innovation finance is -- and will remain -- geographically concentrated.
   Sand Hill Road is the Wall Street of Venture Capital, and the leading Series A+ venture firms will continue to produce the best economic outcomes for both founders and early investors.


2. But innovation activity is increasingly diffuse.
   The collapsing cost of software innovation and globalization of entrepreneurial culture means that elite founding teams will be increasingly be distributed among a growing number of global innovation hubs (e.g, those identified in the Startup Genome ecosystem report).


3. Early-stage innovation finance is highly contested within innovation financial hubs...
   Incumbent (VC) and insurgent (super-angel / Micro VC) finance players compete aggressively for access to elite founding teams located within the top innovation finance markets: SF/Bay Area and (more recently) New York.


4. ...but few money-center investors are effective at systematically sourcing quality early-stage deals in secondary innovation markets.
   Most traditional money-center firms still expect founders to relocate; those willing to invest outside money-center hubs still struggle with weak sourcing and diligence networks pre-deal, and weak oversight and support systems post-deal. 

In the context of these assumptions, the role of a seed fund in a secondary (non-money-center) market is crystal clear:

Secondary market seed funds are market specialists, building a fabric of relationships and on-the-ground founder support that connects the growing pool of high-performing global innovation markets with the few global hubs for innovation finance

Does this mean you can't build a Tier 1 Series A+ VC firm outside the Bay Area or New York? Brad Feld's success at Foundry Group (located in Boulder, CO) suggests otherwise.

Does it mean that every early-stage investor outside the money-center markets has to build deep ties to the Valley? Obviously not: a tiny percentage of startups in any market are really a fit for VC; many will go on to build terrific businesses with the help of local angel investors.

But for me and my work at Founders' Co-op these assumptions create an operating framework that's both simple and clear

• I am a market-maker, matching world-class founders in secondary markets with the "best" (most effective / most ethical / deepest market understanding) money-center venture investors for their stage and focus.
• My #1 job is to find amazing entrepreneurial talent in markets that are overlooked or under-penetrated by money-center venture investors.
• When I find them, I must do everything in my power -- from money and relationship access to hands-on hustle -- to prepare them and their companies for success in the next tier of the capital markets.
• To maximize their odds of capital markets success I must also develop trusted "buy side" relationships with as diverse a cross-section of Tier 1 venture investors as possible, so I'm able to make relevant founder/investor matches with speed and accuracy.

If I do these things well, repeatedly, for years and years:

• I will help amazing founders achieve their dreams and make a difference in the world
• I will make money for my investors
• I will make money for myself, my business partner and my family
• I will be able to raise a new -- small -- fund every few years so I can keep on doing it.

I'm aware that the world is full of urgent needs and I'm not sure my work will do much to meet them, but helping gifted makers make is what I love to do. I'm grateful to have found this work while I still have time and energy to learn a new craft, and I honestly can't think of anything else I'd rather do.

The world is changing fast and I'm sure I'll have to revise my plans accordingly, but for the time being you know where to find me -- hammering away at creating the best damn secondary market seed fund I can build.

=====================================================

**NOTE -- if you want to dig deeper into the accelerating structural changes among tech/innovation funders, investors and entrepreneurs, a few research papers worth reading include: 

• "Buy Local? The Geography of Successful and Unsuccessful Venture Capital Expansion" - Harvard Business School
• "We have met the enemy and he is us: Lessons from Twenty Years of the Kauffman Foundation’s Investments in Venture Capital Funds and The Triumph of Hope over Experience" - Marion Ewing Kauffman Foundation; and
• "Seed Investing Report: Startup Orphans and the Series A Crunch" - CB Insights
• "Startup Ecosystem Report 2012" - Startup Genome