2015 v 2025: a founder's perspective
Hector and James over at Riding Unicorns (I suspect they didn’t entirely test that title with an Irish audience) invited me on to their show a little while back to chat about my style of building and investing in companies. Our conversation reflected my broad activities across the general startup stack (i.e. both what’s happening with investors but also how founders are thinking) and spent a bunch of time around my two favourite topics: the next generation of founders and the evolution of capital markets for private companies. At some point I will come up with a clever word to describe this.
Somewhat relatedly, I have enjoyed reading Hunter Walk’s musings on the VC landscape for several years. He is part of that (relatively) quiet VC group who keep their fund sizes small and, I suspect, their returns quite high as a result. He wrote an interesting 10yr retrospective Was/Now on investing which made me think about an equivalent for founders. Here’s how I see 2015 v 2025:
