A Scientific Approach to VC
Finding defensible magic is hard. Completing your Ph.D. is hard. Building a company is hard.
Understanding how VC works should be easy.
But so many scientist-founders never get the full breakdown. Once you see how it all fits together, everything makes sense. Why some companies get funded and others don’t.
This is the stuff that I learned over the years as a founder and investor. It’s the stuff that people say, and the stuff they don’t say but expect you to know anyway. (The latter is far more important).
I made 148 different versions of my pitch deck for my company when I was a scientist-founder. In hindsight, as an investor, they all look stupid. What I was missing was an understanding of how investors think, and what incentivizes them.
So I want to share this with you so you don’t make the same mistakes.
Hopefully, this is the last primer on VC you will ever need to read.
ACT I: The Investors
There are two kinds of investors. People who invest their own money. And people who invest other people’s money.
People who invest their money are called angels. They have no real rules. Everyone is motivated by making money, but they might also invest ...
