Build or Invest

I like reading all day. I can read all day, every day. If you’re the kind of person who wants to read all day every day, that’s probably a good signal you want to invest, not build. --------- Kyle Samani (2024, Venture Capitalist)

It takes over a decade for a successful startup to develop into a thriving public company. As an investor, you won’t receive positive feedback for over 10 years. You will receive plenty of negative feedback while many of your companies shut down. Maintaining belief in your abilities and processes takes a degree of productive delusion and strong self-confidence. 

Due Diligence and Analytical Skills

Evaluation Process: Employs a data-driven approach, with a dedicated team for market research and financial analysis.

Risk Management: Focuses on startups with strong management teams and scalable business models to mitigate risks.

Personal Traits and Skills

Visionary Thinking: Known for identifying disruptive technologies early.

Decisiveness: Quick to make investment decisions, often outpacing competitors.

Resilience: Has experienced failures but learned and adapted from them.

A successful investor combines industry expertise, a strong network, and a keen eye for innovative startups, which together drive their continued success in the venture capital ecosystem.

As a builder Elon Musk said, “boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there as opposed to reasoning by analogy.”

This involves a three-step process: 

(1) challenging conventional thinking, 

(2) breaking problems into their fundamental principles (i.e., their most basic elements or truths) 

(3) creating new solutions from scratch. 

Musk famously used this process to come up with Space X’s affordable and reusable rockets. 

His original plan was to buy secondhand rockets in Russia, but they were too expensive. 

Starting with first principles thinking,

(step 1) he wondered why rockets are so expensive. 

(step 2) After breaking them down into their components, he noticed that the cost of materials 

was only two percent of the total price. 

(step 3) Therefore, he decided to buy materials (such as aluminum alloys, titanium and carbon fiber) on the commodity market and build his own rockets.

See You at The Top