There have been many different approaches to ranking VC Firms over the years I’ve been an entrepreneur and a VC. Each approach I’ve seen has issues. Most are easily gamed or have statistical bias issues. I got the following note from Roy Bahat at Bloomberg Beta a while ago about a new approach called Founder’s Choice. We and a few other firms sponsored a “founders choice” version of the Midas List, with a legit (IMHO) rating methodology, built by two Penn students. No vitriol possible (unlike The Funded, etc.). We’ve wanted this to exist for a long time — NPS of us as a firm is too forgiving a metric, everyone scores well.

Registration for the Venture Deals Fall 2022 course is open. The course is free and starts on September 20, 2022. This is the second time we are running the new version of the course (v2!) that was co-created with Techstars and Kauffman Fellows. If interested, sign up now. I hope to see you there in one of the AMAs we will host for anyone who takes the course.

Registration is open for the 2022 Q4 Leadership Bootcamp, which is happening in Boulder, Colorado, on Nov 10-13, 2022. Regular readers of this blog know about my long-time (back to 1996) friendship with Reboot co-founder and CEO Jerry Colonna. What you may not know is that several years ago, Jerry and his partner Ali Schultz moved exactly 0.8 miles away from me (there is one 40-acre parcel of land between us.) In the evening, when we are both in Boulder (well, Longmont), he sits under his Cottonwood Tree, I sit 0.8 miles away on my couch next to my pool, and we text and wave at each other.

Of all the business and technology writers out there, including bloggers, I think the best one, at this moment, is Matt Levine. He’s the only person currently writing on Planet Earth that I find myself reading every word of everything he writes. For the last few months, he has been mostly writing about three topics: The Twitter Elon Musk Soap Opera Why (and How) Much of Crypto Is A Plain, Old, Ponzi Scheme Other Crazy and Fucked Up Things in Finance For a flavor of his writing, read the following 11 chapters of Matt’s writing (listed in chronological order). Then, subscribe to his newsletter and get a magnificent medium-form article in your inbox every other day or so.

In the last seven months, the venture / entrepreneurial world has gone from “the only thing that matters is massive growth” to “the world is going to end.” For perspective, all you need to do is look at a dozen high-flying IPOs from 2020 or 2021 to see that the peak happened just before Thanksgiving. The private markets lag the public markets. That’s not new. This time around, the lag was about a quarter, as many VCs started to talk about what was happening around the beginning of Q2.

My partner Ryan shared this with me. It’s a 10-minute video showing the evolution from System 0.97 to macOS 13 Ventura. I had an original Macintosh 128K which is now enjoying its retirement at the Media Archaeology Lab. Enjoy!

The 2nd Edition of my book Startup Boards: A Field Guide to Building and Leading an Effective Board of Directors launched today. My co-authors, Matt Blumberg, the CEO of Bolster, and Mahendra Ramsinghani, were a joy to work with. While the 1st Edition was a good book, I wasn’t particularly proud of it because I didn’t feel like it was my best writing. We worked hard on this edition, and I now feel like it’s equivalent in quality to my other books.

Connie Loizos is one of the long-time tech industry writers who I respect. I don’t respond to many interview requests these days, but I’ll always talk to her. She has a good article today in TechCrunch titled Embrace the down round (it’s going to be okay, maybe). I like the quote she pulled out of me in our conversation. [Brad Feld] says his “strong belief” that “just doing a clean resetting — at whatever the valuation so that everybody is aligned and dealing with reality — is much, much better for a company.”

About a year ago, I decided to take a summer vacation from blogging. I didn’t feel like blogging when summer ended, so I extended my blogging vacation indefinitely. I figured I’d wake up one day and feel like blogging again or not. That summer vacation (from blogging) lasted a year. Initially, I was working on a new book that I got bored of midway through the summer. I put it on the shelf with several other partially completed books. Google Docs now has a surprising number of my started but unfinished books.