Over the weekend, Tobi, the founder and CEO of Shopify, discussed the major reason investors passed on Shopify in the early days : market size.

I remember that financing round, & I remember having the same concern, & making the same mistake. Living in the valley & driving on

We are excited to reveal our investment in Saltz.app, the fresh products marketplace for restaurants/hotels. Co-founded by🇱🇹serial entrepreneurs Andrius Slimas, Tomas Šlimas and Reinis Strodahs. €3M seed round led by Petteri Koponen with Miki Kuusi Rytis Vitkauskas & more

So it may surprise some of you to learn that folks do raise venture capital after a rough patch all the time. In fact, it’s pretty common. VCs know the vast majority of startups have a tougher time or two.

But … but … VCs need some proof you are back to growth. They need

Who did this?

Narcissistic leaders are threatened by talent. They want to be the smartest person in the room.

Humble leaders are drawn to talent. They surround themselves with people who make them smarter.

Great leaders grow talent. They strive to make everyone in the room smarter.

Did you know it’s easier to raise with an idea at Inception versus raising when you have a product with some traction but not a ton?

I call this the reason to believe - one can always believe in the future + the dream at the idea stage but as one launches a product the dream

There are few things I enjoy quite as much as watching indoctrinated Western virtue signallers get epically destroyed by people from developing countries who are willing to be honest.

CEOs often think 'founder re-vesting' on financings is some kind of benefit to the VCs, but it really benefits the CEO and other members of the team more. Nobody wants to really acknowledge that though (until it's too late and they wish they had).

This is so true! Founders handing over sales too early often leads to pre-mature scaling.

FJ Labs’ B2B Marketplace Thesis

For consumers, the Internet has made everything cheaper, better, and faster. We have extraordinary user experiences and infinite convenience. Digital penetration is above 20% in many categories. We can order almost anything online on Amazon and

A founder in our portfolio once shared an amazing analogy about being a VC backed company.

He likened it to Back to the Future. In that movie, the car needed to hit a speed of 88MPH to time travel. Inevitably, it was always speeding towards a brick wall or cliff.

Join us at TechChill | #techchill2024 in just a few weeks!

So excited to see our portfolio co Drovo partnering with Bolt to enable interactive advertising screens on Bolt cars! 🤝

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang: “People with very high expectations have very low resilience—and unfortunately, resilience matters in success.'

Charlie Munger: 'The first rule of a happy life is low expectations. If you have unrealistic expectations, you're going to be miserable.'

Compensation isn’t how you motivate someone to do great work, it’s how you reward and retain someone who can’t help but do great work.

Estonian car subscription company Planet42 has recently secured €15M in funding from South African Standard Bank Group. €3M was provided as an equity #investment and €12M - as a #loan in the local #SouthAfrican currency, rands.

Founded in 2017 by Estonian entrepreneurs Eerik Oja

Naspers-backed Planet42 raised local-currency debt and equity funding from Standard Ban to help the South Africa-focused rent-to-buy startup repay costly euro-denominated loans trib.al/GbacvJ6

I posted some thoughts on liquidiation preferences over at Hacker News: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=395989…

Hierarchy of investors

Level 1: Actively sabotage portfolio companies
Level 2: Push bad ideas that lead founders down wrong paths
Level 3: Distract companies with random obligations, ideas, etc that have to be fended off
Level 4: Hands off, neutral, and generally supportive

This is a good observation by Martin Tobias (Pre-Seed VC) that even the longest of journeys often start with small steps.