🧰 Venture Tools #002

Leverage vs Efficiency

💡Insight - Leverage vs Efficiency

‘Efficiency is what lazy people aspire to’

Many founders I meet wrongly focus on efficiency: reducing the effort (or cost) required for any given outcome.

Founders should focus on leverage - maximising the results for any given effort.

Efficiency vs Leverage is the equivalent of minimising downside vs maximising upside.

Your downside (cost) is limited. Your upside (growth) is unbounded.

Arm your company with a team that gives it leverage.

Arm your team with tools and processes which give them leverage.

I first learned about this concept from Henry Ward, founder of Carta (then called eShares). It’s a core part of their operating philosophy and culture, which you can read about here (one of my favourite reads on culture).

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🎟️ The Marketplace Conference

If you’re a marketplace founder or investor - this is *the* event of the year to network with your peers.

There is a stellar line-up of investors and founders giving strategy masterclasses and intimate fireside chats.

The kind people at Speedinvest (shout-out to Toyosi) have offered readers of my newsletter 20% off tickets. Use the code: MPC22_ALEXMAC_SPECIAL

See you there?

🛠️ Tools

1. 4WARD.VC’s Climate VC & Accelerator Database - 600+ climate investors filterable by stage, sector, geography & size. 4WARD.VC also run 2 great slack communities for Climate tech founders and VCs, join me there.

2. ‘Your customers’ profitability is your startup’s future health’ - great post by Tomasz Tunguz at Redpoint.

3. Hiring: Why More is Often Less - from Ravi Gupta - insight for companies that are about to scale-up their hiring.

4. ‘Stop Pitching, Start Storytelling’ - stories are vital to startup success, and this post teaches you how to build it from Tom White and the team at Stonks.

5. The Sutton Capital VC Library - Example memos, financial models and resources for VCs.

6. Keith Rabois on how to navigate a downturn - the Founders Fund partner packs this episode with knowledge bombs.

7. Muscial.ly’s (TikTok) Alex Zhu on Igniting Viral Growth and Building a User Community - an old one, but still relevant today.

8. Founder’s Choice VC Leaderboard - who would have thought Andreessen Horowitz would be ranked bottom quartile?

Finally… did you know passionate startup pitches can literally change people’s minds?

Ethan Mollick @emollick

Good startup pitches can literally change people’s minds. This fMRI study show passionate pitches increase neural engagement & ups investor interest by 26%. A caveat: other work shows professional investors aren’t moved by the passion behind pitches, though amateur investors are

(if you have any tools you want to suggest for next week - DM me)

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🧑‍🚀 Jobs

Expect more listings here in future weeks, it’s not just going to be roles at my own company…

1. Engineering, Product, Business Development Roles /// London /// Remote - Odin, one of my portfolio companies at the forefront of capitalism 2.0 is hiring for a wide range of roles. More information here.

2. 10+ roles at varying levels of seniority from London to New York to SF in this thread from Nicole DeTommaso

Nicole DeTommaso 🪄 @nic_detommaso

VC Job Openings🪄 Sharing because there NEEDS to be more access to these open VC roles! Check out this week's openings (Sept 8-14)👇

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Thank you for reading the first edition. Feedback is always welcome. Have an awesome week 🤌