Author Archives: David Lee

With a hat tip to Peter King, whose format I’ve used before: 1. I think 2014 was a great year for Bitcoin. # No major security failures. No systemic loss of confidence, i.e., price dropping to single digits. https://twitter.com/elidourado/status/545015760075382784 Increased merchant adoption: https://twitter.com/davidlee/status/544956822646300672 https://twitter.com/davidlee/status/543099540174155776 Healthy regulatory scrutiny: Ben Lawsky: “Four decades of slow-to-non-existent progress in […]

When I first started investing, I got a lot of advice. Most people had the same thoughts on what to look for – the “Do’s” of venture investing. None of these were surprising and remain the case today. Do: work with great founders;look for big markets;yada yada And many gave me advice about what not […]

We frequently get asked for email introductions to business development partners. Inspired by Roy Bahat, I wrote a tweetstorm on some best practices. See below. In general, you should assume that the business development partner has (1) very busy people and (2) most likely, little incentive to meet you (unless you are the Startup Du […]

“Entrepreneurs are often given two pieces of contradictory advice: persistence and flexibility. Have a vision and pursue it through years of people telling you you’re out of your mind. Or, be flexible: look at data, iterate, and change based on the signals you’re getting. There isn’t an actual algorithm. You have an investment thesis about […]

I would rather be in the cycle when people underestimate us, because I would rather be underestimated. Then we can really excite and amaze people. I think a lot of people are underestimating us.-Mark Zuckerberg, Sept. 11, 2012

People ask us all the time if we’re in a “technology bubble.” I’m not sure what that question means so I try to think about it through a different lens. The key question I ask is whether one should be optimistic or pessimistic for the near- and long-term trends in technology. Peter Thiel has some […]

“I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that I don’t know the other side’s argument better than they do.” -Charlie Munger

I tweet frequently about our portfolio companies’ products. It’s a little shameless and shameful at the same time. I get annoyed when others do it so I don’t know why I still do it. But whatever. The main reason why one would get annoyed is two-fold. First, there’s an obvious financial self interest in doing […]

David Boies is one of – if not the – most brilliant lawyers in the past 20 years. He’s certainly one of the most celebrated, having argued US v. Microsoft, the landmark case that decided that Microsoft was liable as a monopolist and Bush v. Gore, which effectively decided the US 2000 Presidential election. I […]

The number of startups doing really hard stuff has skyrocketed recently. Bitcoin, drones, food substitutes, 3D printing, bioinformatics, deep learning. We used to see these “science fiction” or “moonshot” startups only occasionally. Now it feels like every other startup (or at least 30%) is working on something pretty wacky. These ideas are like old school […]