We should always do this—having incumbents encourage and welcome healthy competition of ideas, as long as everyone supports the winner in the end. This happened with Biden and Bernie Sanders—with Biden ultimately letting Sanders push him to the left on some issues as the new White House set policy after graciously hearing him out in the debates.

There’s no reason why we can’t have real debates and real choices, and then once someone is chosen, support them in the general election.

I know a lot of really smart, interesting people. That’s why I find myself telling a lot of people that I’d love it if they shared their thoughts more often in public. I don’t much care whether they do it in writing, or a newsletter, a podcast or on LinkedIn—but I feel like I every time I interact with them, I learn something or I’m inspired to think about things in a different way.

Yet, the response I get most often is, “But there’s already so much content out there!”

I’ve never quite related to that way of thinking—mostly because I don’t actually find most online content to be that good. Remember, you don’t have to outrun the bear. You just have to outrun the slowest camper—and in the world of online thought leadership, there are a lot of slow campers.

Say what you will about VCs, but we’re a mostly predictable bunch. You know what our incentives are and we care enough about our reputation within the ecosystem to not do anything too terrible—usually.

Still, there are a lot of downsides to taking venture money—the push to grow at all costs, our desire to be all up in your business, literally, and sometimes, we’re kind of obnoxious.

That’s why when you come upon someone outside the traditional ecosystem, there might be a lot of compelling reasons to take their money

To not be “transactional” and not think about specific goals like this is to be inconsiderate—which is not to mean “rude” but to quite literally lack consideration. You just didn’t think of me and what I might need or whether helping you is a way I might want to spend my time.

Or, you’re pretending not to know what you want or hiding it, in order to prevent me from having the opportunity to make that judgment myself as to whether or not this is going to be a fit. Sorry, but that’s not more polite or more human. It’s deceptive.

Two weeks ago, I opened X/Twitter and got pushed an ad for an anti-trans movie produced by PragerU and that was my final straw with this cesspool.

I immediately requested my Twitter archive of over 63,000 tweets over 16 and a half years. Not surprisingly, it took nearly two weeks for me to receive a link to it given how understaffed the company is.

Once I got it, I deleted my account.

I’m gone from Twitter for as long as Elon Musk continues to own it.

I find level setting to be one of the most difficult things to do around any task or skill. Just how good is good? What are the best people accomplishing? How do you measure it?

It comes up a lot with my coaching clients who aspire to be top VCs and are trying to figure out how to self-assess and goal set.

I figured the best way to go about answering would be to ask the best of the best. Over the last couple of weeks, I asked everyone who has been on the Forbes Midas List over the last three years what their activity and accomplishment actually looks like in the functional areas of the job.

Besides being “busy doing great deals and distributing cash to your LPs”, what are they’re actually doing to make that happen?

I’ve made over 100 investments in my career and nearly half of those went into diverse teams.

I’ll be the first to back up the notion that diverse founders have just as much ambition, drive, intellectual horsepower, creativity—you name it—than anyone else. In fact, you could make the argument that, because of their lack of advantages in other areas, the ones who make it to a venture pitch actually have more of these raw ingredients because they’ve had to in order to make it to the same destination as their straight white male counterparts.

There is, however, an advantage that some founders have over others that I hate to admit exists—but one that I would very much like to solve for.

“Israelis & Palestinians do not deserve the consequences of evil forces that drive those who make decisions, profit from conflict, and push hateful rhetoric that make people lose their consciousness.”

This was a very powerful sentiment that I wholeheartedly embrace found in a very difficult to read (warning) Instagram post about the horror of the Hamas terrorist attack on October 7th.

This post is about considering the costs of war.