with the age of easy money clearly over i feel like there’s a spectrum of possibilities for aspiring founders - on one end you invent or are close to a scientific breakthrough & you start a business to commercialize the innovation. on the other end it’s like leveraging existing
tech & finding an innovative way to sell goods or deliver services. for the former, examples would be like the transistor or more recently the gpu. invention happens, you start a company to test the waters & see if theres a market for the new innovation. for the latter end of the
spectrum examples would be like amazon or airbnb which used developments in tech to create a previously unimaginable kind of business. obv lots of examples in the middle where a biz is born from some parts harnessing a scientific breakthrough & some parts an innovative biz model.
either way, your goal is some sort of exit - going public or being acquired, at which point investors will value you on your ability to generate cash, so the most powerful founders will leverage the science/tech & create business models that actually generate cash when they scale
this line of thinking is why one of my “hot takes” is that crossover funds *could* *potentially* *if executed with discipline* be v successful & lucrative for partners & LPs because if shrewd investors understand what works in public market dynamics why not buy equity pre ipo?
i have a bunch of thoughts on this but i’m too lazy to make a substack. i think there was this meme of like “great companies burn money forever to get to an impenetrable scale” combined w money being free & founders having the leverage and so incentives ended up way out of whack
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