Henrik Torstensson's Weblog

Stripe co-founder and president John Collison interviews the late Charlie Munger on the Invest Like The Best podcast.

Spotify has announced a 17 % (ca 1500 people) reduction in the number employees. This cut follow reductions of about 8 % earlier in 2023.

Charlie O’Donnell has a good blog post, for venture capitalists, called Level Setting and Career Goals for VCs: What level are Midas List VCs actually performing on?

He shares what he believes is world class performance for venture capitalist in the following areas: Visibility, Sourcing, Reputation, Screening, Domain Knowledge, Deal Closing, Board Approach, Capital Network, Talent Network, and Corporate Network.

This year ‘the magnificent seven’ have dominated the American stock market. But zooming out to two years, they have performed roughly in-line with the overall stock market as they underperformed in 2022.

Viaplay’s announced pay-to-play recapitalization plan highlights a few lessons that are also applicable for startups.

• The Golden Rule (Whoever has the gold makes the rules) is especially important when a company is about to run out of money, is about to break loan covenants or cannot pay its debt.
• Debt gives leverage in both directions. When things are not going well, it amplifies the problems and creates instability for the company and shareholders. In addition to the fact that interest payments and amortization are creating a cash outflow.
• Equity, as a comparision, is stable and don’t create a cash outflow.
• Taking on significant operational costs and liabilities without fully securing funding creates a big dillution risk for shareholders that cannot or are unwilling to provide additional equity funding if needed.

Forbes ranks the most successful venture capitalists in Europe in 2023.

Charlie Munger, the 99-year old vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, and often quotable investor died yesterday.

A PDF with a collection of Charlie’s writings and Q&A sessions at shareholders’ meetings. His interview with Acquired is only about a month old.

Atomico has released the 2023 edition of State of European Tech covering startups and venture financing in Europe.

A startup, and for that matter all organisations, have limited resources. To get customers to adopt a new behavior or a new product you need to be a lot better on a few things (let’s say 10x). To achieve that requires an intense focus. This means there is limited time to do everything else, so it should be done but not more (let’s call it good enough).

A startup should try to do some things 10x better and most things just good enough. Figuring out which areas needs to be 10x:d and doing them really well is very difficult.

(This was inspired by a lunch discussion with Stockholm-based entrepreneur.)

Peter Thiel on four ways to “build a monopoly“:

• Super fast distribution on a very thin product (e.g. Twitter)
• A technological advantage that is continually built upon: you come up with something new and steadily improve (e.g. enterprise SaaS software)
• A truly brilliant breakthrough (e.g. Bitcoin)
• Complex coordination—where you take a lot of little pieces and coordinate them into something new