Writing
Notes on venture creation, the studio model, and what the research says. Some of this is academic, some is practitioner-facing, some is just me thinking out loud.
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Acting Anyway
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…
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The Cost of Finding Out
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…
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Obsoleting the Apex Cogitator
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…
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The Attribution Problem
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…
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The Production Function Problem
The Cobb-Douglas function has anchored growth economics for a century. AI may be breaking its core assumptions about how capital and labor relate.
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Lucky Knowledge
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.
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Outcome, Output, Process
AI compresses the production layer of knowledge work. Human value migrates to specification and validation. The seniority premium is widening, not shrinking.
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What Kind of Institution Is This?
Venture studios don’t fit neatly into existing categories. They may represent something historically novel in how companies get created.
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Venture Studios as Compound Real Options
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.
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The Fat Middle
Venture capital chases outliers. But the structural opportunity may be in the derisked middle of the distribution, where studios can build repeatable value.
Longer work
Unfounded: The Venture Studio Model. Book in progress. An honest examination of what the evidence says about venture studios: what works, what doesn’t, and what we still don’t know.
Quantitative Analysis of Venture Studio Success Factors. Authored research paper. In revision for publication.