Choose Good Quests

An older, from 2022, article Choose Good Quests. I found it while reading Build What’s Fundable. Kind of a call to arms to solve important and difficult problems.

I believe there’s a lot of value in driving productivity and economic growth in itself. As an example, a lot of good things could be done today if Sweden and Europe had had 0.5 % higher of annual GDP/capita growth in the last 15 years.

Driving productivity can often be done by replacing current solutions with better and/or cheaper ones in a, relatively, lower risk way for entrepreneurs.

Doing something important that requires fundamental advances in technology (and product) is significantly harder and riskier. Choosing a good quest, as I understand it, is to do that despite it being difficult. Especially for the few people that can gather the resources to do so.

Build What’s Fundable

Kyle Harrison has written Build What’s Fundable. It’s a good, and long, read on the development of venture capital and startup funding over the last 20 years. An article for students of startup and venture capital on how startup funding became more professional, but that brought second-order effects of startups being ‘manufactured’ to access follow-on funding.

I don’t think it is wrong to adapt strategy to make fundraising easier (it is really hard for 99 % of startups, so all advantages are worth seeking), but agree with Kyle’s point that one should seek to ‘find beliefs worth living for’. Not only making sure the next fundraising round is a success.

I think I’ll have more thoughts related to the article once I’ve read it again and have let it ponder for a while.

AI models drive overall VC funding in 2025

Accel has published its Globalscape report for 2025 titled Race for Compute (PDF to download).

Many interesting data points across the report, but I found these two charts on just how significant the funding of a few companies (OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI) is to overall VC investments and how 25x more capital is invested in US-based AI models than in Europe/Israel.

Einride announces to go public via SPAC merger at $1.8 billion valuation

Einride, the Swedish electric and autonomous freight company, has announced that it will merge with a U.S.-listed SPAC (Special Purpose Acquisition Vehicle). Einride currently has $45 million in annual recurring revenue and contracted annual recurring revenue of $65 million from more than 25 customers and 200 vehicles in operation.

The valuation in the merger is targeted to be $1.8 billion and the new company is targeted to have $219 million in cash (before potential redemptions and transaction expenses) and is looking to raise another $100 million.

It is good that the stock market provides actual risk capital to companies and not only buy shares in already profitable companies and wait for dividend and share buybacks. When making such early-stage investments a public market investor should operate like a venture investor: build a diversified portfolio and don’t invest too much into individual companies.

Red flags to screen startups rarely work

Yesterday I was at Nordic Founder’s Pitch or Die Trying event at Epicenter in Stockholm.

The highlight was a fireside chat with Charles Maddock, founder of Strawberry, focused on the company’s pre-seed and seed fundraising.

Following Charles was a panel of investors who, among other things, were asked about red flags that would disqualify a company from an investment.

That is a question I find interesting.

I don’t think startup investing is so easy, or companies and founding stories so perfect, that absolute red flags should be used very often or broadly.

The startup investor job is to try and understand each startup and its unique opportunity to become an important, large company.

With the exception of fraud or dishonesty, pretty much all red flag situations (like ownership by founders at Series A, team’s technical or business ability, and previous proof points of founder being great) can be dealt with. The question is if there are signs of exceptional strength in at least one area that make it worthwhile spending the time on it.

By the way, having as a red flag that the founders are married has a pretty poor track record as there are a bunch of outlier outcomes where founders were/are married.

20VC interviews Benchmark partner Everett Randle

Good 20VC interview on venture capital investing with Benchmark’s new partner Everett Randle.

Everett has a background from some of the best software/venture investing firms (Vista Equity Partners, Bond, Founders Fund, and Kleiner Perkins) and it was interesting to hear some of his thoughts on how the firms (including their lead partners and culture) are different while the firms all are successful.

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When did you encourage founders to go bigger?

A good interview with Sten Tamikvi of Plural, an European early stage VC fund, in Dragos Novac’s Sunday CET.

Sten’s final question to the readers is good:

“And of course, a question I hope all European investors would ask themselves at least weekly: when was the last time you encouraged your founders to go bigger, bolder, faster, more aggressive than they proposed?”

I believe that the same way lack of ambition (for lack of a better word) make it harder to attract people and capital to a startup, being overly aggressive for aggressiveness sake can backfire even if a startup does attract great people and capital, as it risks premature scaling.

But anyone raising venture capital to finance her startup should aim to go big, that is as important as early product/market fit or early traction.

When to go aggressively big and when to wait a little? That is a question that has a unique answer for every startup.