Short
10 articles tagged short.
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The English Longbow: A Simple History
For about 120 years — roughly 1330 to 1450 — England had the deadliest weapon in Europe. It was a six-foot piece of yew wood. The reason it worked is the reason it eventually…
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The Children in the Woods
A parable. About the difference between moving forward and going somewhere — and what happens, deep in the forest, to the ones who stop.
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Position F — The Five-Minute Version
A short overview of Position F: a per-company estate election at death between settlement under the existing reform and a deferred-realisation regime capped at ten years. The proposal in five…
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The 33%
Cooper, Woo and Dunkelberg surveyed 2,994 entrepreneurs in 1988. Thirty-three percent rated their probability of success at one hundred percent. They were not failing at probability theory. They were…
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Why Fund Economics Need Overconfident Founders
A typical early-stage venture fund makes about twenty-five investments. Its returns to limited partners depend almost entirely on whether one or two turned out to be extreme outliers. What that math…
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What the Natural Experiment Shows
The US, UK, and EU run variants of the same venture model under different conditions. Comparing the three lets us ask which features of the system are intrinsic to running a venture model at all…
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Both Halves of the Headline Are True
Venture capital is good for society and bad for most founders. Readers who hear that sentence often assume one of the two halves must be wrong. Both are documented in the empirical literature. The…
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Venture Capital Is Good for Society and Bad for Most Founders
Venture capital is good for society and bad for most founders. Both halves are documented in the empirical literature. Most writing about VC handles one half or the other; this piece handles both.
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The Wrong Winners Write the Books
Founder advice is not only survivor-biased. It is filtered toward the survivors most certain that their outcome was repeatable. The classic survivorship filter is well known…
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The Whole Question, in Five Minutes
Anyone who wants the question and the contested arguments in five minutes. About 600 words. The phone-screen version.