Author: Tom West

  • Acting Anyway

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    Tom West
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    There’s a distinction I keep coming back to that I think matters more than most people give it credit for. Knowledge and intelligence are different things. Aristotle drew this line precisely: episteme is systematic knowledge of how things are; deinotes is raw cleverness, the ability to look at a situation and figure out what to…

  • The Cost of Finding Out

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    Tom West
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    It costs seven cents to find out if a venture idea is worth thinking about. That is not a metaphor. It is the actual cost, based on my first few hundred tests, of running a concept through systematic screening: competitive landscape, market structure, demand signals, structural defensibility. Seven cents and about ninety seconds of compute.…

  • Obsoleting the Apex Cogitator

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    Tom West
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    I was honored to be in Cambridge last week to present findings at the first annual venture builder symposium. It was humbling and inspiring to walk past buildings where humans discovered calculus, decoded DNA, and split the atom. Eight hundred years of cognitive achievement, concentrated in a few square miles of limestone and ambition. And…

  • The Attribution Problem

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    Tom West
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    A venture studio builds twelve companies over four years. Three reach meaningful scale. The studio points to its process: the structured ideation, the stage gates, the shared services layer, the CEO matching. The narrative is clean. The studio’s system produced the outcomes. But did it? This is the attribution problem, and it sits at the…

  • The Production Function Problem

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    Tom West
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    The Cobb-Douglas function has anchored growth economics for a century. AI may be breaking its core assumptions about how capital and labor relate.

  • Lucky Knowledge

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    Tom West
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    Three exits don’t prove pattern recognition. Venture capital’s feedback loop is too long, too noisy, and too confounded to distinguish expertise from luck.

  • Outcome, Output, Process

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    Tom West
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    AI compresses the production layer of knowledge work. Human value migrates to specification and validation. The seniority premium is widening, not shrinking.

  • What Kind of Institution Is This?

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    Tom West
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    Venture studios don’t fit neatly into existing categories. They may represent something historically novel in how companies get created.

  • Venture Studios as Compound Real Options

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    Tom West
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    Each stage gate in a venture studio purchases the right, not the obligation, to invest further. The real options framework changes how you think about studio returns.

  • The Fat Middle

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    Tom West
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    Venture capital chases outliers. But the structural opportunity may be in the derisked middle of the distribution, where studios can build repeatable value.