1/ Recently been listening to @chamath on the @theallinpod + @CNBC (man, he would make for a fascinating compilation; too bad most of his stuff is private 🤷).
That said, @socialcapital does have 2 public letters. Some notes on the first one (2018) below 👇
That said, @socialcapital does have 2 public letters. Some notes on the first one (2018) below 👇
2/ “The hardest thing for most startups today is the path to market: first finding product-market fit and a way to reach customers, and then building a ruthless machine to acquire, monetize, and retain them.”
3/ “Advertising spend in tech has become an arms race: fresh tactics go stale in months, and customer acquisition costs keep rising.”
4/ “user acquisition in tech today: as growth becomes increasingly expensive, somebody must be footing the bill for all of this wasteful spending. But whom? It’s not who you think, and the dynamics we’ve entered is, in many ways, creating a dangerous, high stakes Ponzi scheme.”
5/ “VCs habitually invest in one another’s companies during later rounds, bidding up rounds to valuations that allow for generous markups on their funds' performance [that] allow VCs to raise subsequent, larger funds, and to enjoy the management fees that those funds generate.”
6/ "Highly marked up valuations, which should be a cost for VCs, have in fact become their key revenue driver."
7/ The real bill ends up getting shuffled out of sight to two other groups.
1) early stage funds’ LPs, particularly the future LPs that invest into the next fund
2) startup employees (who lack the means to do anything about the problem but leave
1) early stage funds’ LPs, particularly the future LPs that invest into the next fund
2) startup employees (who lack the means to do anything about the problem but leave
8/ “The antidote is two-fold. First, we need to return to the roots of venture investing. The real expense in a startup [should be] the cost of real innovation and R&D. The second is to break away from the multilevel marketing scheme that the VC-LP-user growth game has become.”
9/ “AI can truly transform how we work, how we live, and even how we think.”
10/ “We’ll be able to work with biology in ways that increasingly resemble the way we work with software: as a platform for building tools, applications, and infrastructure. This time, however, we’ll be able to do it using living systems instead of code.”
11/ “Companies solving the world’s hardest problems are often those with the fewest competitors… They are the companies that will truly create, rather than merely participate, in new markets.” 
12/ “We have therefore decided that a technology holding company was a structure much more amenable to making the contrarian, long-term investments that we wanted to make. Our new structure will allow us to invest with uncompromising conviction, for the long run.”
End/ As always, compilations here: 12mv2.com/compilations
And @chamath, if you ever plan on making 2011-2017 letters available, let me know 😂. Only place I can think of starting a compilation for you 😬
And @chamath, if you ever plan on making 2011-2017 letters available, let me know 😂. Only place I can think of starting a compilation for you 😬
