One thing I hear founders discussing is raising the next round of growth capital from venture capital investors. That’s their goal. They orient everything the team does around it. They spend time figuring out what metrics investors need to see to be comfortable investing. Then they work backward to hit those metrics.

I know a founder who set a goal of raising a few million for his seed round, even though he had sufficient capital in the bank. He heard that seed-stage investors want to see a few hundred thousand dollars in revenue before considering writing a check. He wasn’t close to that, so he found a way to get there fast. His software product was sold on a subscription basis (monthly or yearly), meaning the revenue was recurring every month or year. He decided to run a promotion to give new customers lifetime access to the product in exchange for a one-time payment at a heavily discounted price. The result was a surge in new customers and one-time revenue.

The founder hit the metric that seed investors wanted and got meetings with dozens of firms. The problem was that the quality of the revenue was low. First, the revenue wasn’t recurring, but the costs of running the platform were. Next, the customers weren’t people who were enthusiastic about the product because it solved a problem for them. Rather, they were bargain hunters who were loyal to getting something for a steal. They were never satisfied, and they needed a lot of handholding from the service team to onboard and use the product. They just weren’t an ideal customer profile for his product. After many conversations, the VC firms decided against investing in this company—I assume for these reasons.

The lesson from this is to start with the right goal. The goal of any company should be to satisfy and bring value to customers by solving a problem that’s sufficiently painful for them. A company that succeeds in doing this produces positive metrics (revenue, retention, engagement, etc.) that investors like to see.

All companies need capital to stay alive, but continuously raising capital from investors shouldn’t be the end goal. Instead, it should be the byproduct of having created something that satisfies customer demand for a solution to a painful problem and that has the potential to scale tremendously. By focusing on the customer and creating something they want, you up your chances of getting capital from investors (if you even need it).

I recently finished reading Bull! A History of the Boom and Bust, 1982–2004 by Maggie Mahar. The book was published in 2004, not too long after the dot-com bubble burst. I’ve seen the book recommended a few times and noticed that the cover includes an endorsement by Warren Buffett, so I ordered it. Also, the book’s narrow focus on the period when interest rates started what ended up being a forty-year decline through 2004 was intriguing to me.

I enjoyed reading the book. Given the focus on a very specific period, it provides lots of details about the economic environment, who the main figures were who had an impact on the stock market, and the key decisions they made. Mahar does a good job of describing her perspective on the impact those decisions had on inflating and bursting the internet bubble.

One thing that caught my attention was her explanation of the role the inclusion of high-flying technology companies in stock market indexes (e.g., the S&P 500 and NASDAQ Composite) played in valuations reaching levels that were hard to justify. She believes that this, combined with the rise of the 401k and index funds, contributed to a significant amount of capital being allocated to these highfliers even though valuations were hard to justify. The valuations of companies kept rising because capital kept flowing into the index funds until the stock market bubble burst around 2000.

This caught my attention because last month, I listened to an interview of David Einhorn, founder of Greenlight Capital. Einhorn shared his opinion of the impact that passive investing is having on the valuations of certain companies in today’s stock market. Essentially, he believes that valuations of companies continue to rise because they’re part of one or more stock market indexes (e.g., the S&P 500 and NASDAQ Composite). Passive index funds track indexes, which leads to the funds buying more shares in these companies, regardless of the valuation, as more investors allocate capital to the passive index funds. For this section of Einhorn’s interview, listen here.

I found this interesting because there’s a twenty-year gap between this book’s publication date and Einhorn’s interview.

A friend shared a quote today that caught my eye:

“People do not decide their futures, they decide their habits and their habits decide their futures.”

~ F. M. Alexander

This statement is simple, clear, and true. We have the power to increase the probability that the future we desire will become reality. If you want a particular outcome, consistently act in a way that aligns with that outcome. It will be more likely to happen.  

This weekend, I was chatting with a friend about public markets and IPOs. Neither of us knew how IPOs are trending this year, so I decided to check the stats. Here’s what I found:

2024 IPOs

• January: 15
• February: 16
• First two months total: 31

For comparison, here are the stats for the same months for the last five years:

2023 IPOs

• January: 8
• February: 17
• First two months total: 25
• Full-year total: 154

2022 IPOs

• January: 34
• February: 32
• First two months total: 66
• Full-year total: 181

2021 IPOs

• January: 118
• February: 132
• First two months total: 250
• Full-year total: 1,035

2020 IPOs

• January: 12
• February: 20
• First two months total: 32
• Full-year total: 480

2019 IPOs

• January: 6
• February: 21
• First two months total: 27
• Full-year total: 232

The number of IPOs completed in the first two months of this year has increased compared to the same months in 2023 (which was an anemic year). But we’re well below the number of IPOs we saw in 2021 (which was a record year).

Interestingly, the stock market reached an all-time high this past week. The NASDAQ Composite Index reached a record high close of 16,274 this past week. Its previous high was 16,057 over two years ago in November 2021.

I’m curious to see how IPO activity plays out for the rest of this year, especially if the NASDAQ Composite Index stays above the records set in 2021.

This is my two-hundred-sixth weekly reflection. Here are my takeaways from this week:

• Commerce gateway – I’m starting to see a pattern in the origin stories of wildly successful entrepreneurs of the last few centuries. Many of them got their start by selling products. They were essentially retailers. After they learned basic entrepreneurial lessons, they found painful problems and created solutions to them. Commerce is a gateway to entrepreneurship for many.
• Storytelling – I’ve kickstarted my progress on my goal of publicly practicing my storytelling in 2024. I still have a few more things I need to do, but I’m hoping to begin telling stories soon.  
• Reading insights – I tested sharing, in my posts, insights from a book I read. This was helpful. While I was reading, I took better notes on potentially insightful passages because I knew I’d be sharing those insights. The process of writing helped clarify my thinking. Overall, this enhanced my reading process.‍
• Reviewing highlights – Digitizing highlights from physical books has been a pain. The best software I’ve found so far isn’t great. I plan to test a few others, but the chances of finding a satisfactory solution to this problem aren’t looking good.

Week two hundred six was another week of learning. Looking forward to next week!

This week, an entrepreneur told me about a real estate project he’s finishing. He shared that he ran into several delays and other hurdles that he didn’t anticipate. Because of them, he had to adjust how he funded the project to give himself enough runway to complete it. The project looks great and is projected to do well financially.

During our chat, I asked him about the projected completion timeline versus what played out. He planned for the project to take a little over a year, and it ended up taking twice as long. The only reason he was able to complete the project instead of being forced to abandon it was that he personally had the cash to see it to completion.

In the end, it should all work out for this entrepreneur. His situation reminded me of a lesson I learned the hard way as an early-stage founder. When I’m doing something difficult, unforeseen events will cause things to take twice as long as I thought they would. Building in enough runway to support things taking twice as long should be part of my plan.

Yesterday I shared a key concept I took away from reading Home Depot cofounder Ken Langone’s book I Love Capitalism!: An American Story. Today I read a section where Langone shared the details of how he orchestrated Home Depot’s successful IPO in 1981. It was a tough environment in which to raise money from public-market investors. The economy was in a recession, inflation was through the roof, and interest rates were surging. But Home Depot was just a start-up and needed cash.

One week before the IPO date, bankers said they could fill only $3 million of the target $6 million the company needed to raise. Langone got to work and figured out a way to craft a creative deal and sell it to the existing investors (who ended up not being able to sell shares in the IPO). Everyone agreed to the new terms, and the company raised the $6 million it badly needed.

Langone’s reflection on this difficult situation stuck with me:

If there’s anything I would take a bow for throughout this whole process, it would be this: never giving up, and thinking creatively, instead of reactively, when the chips are down . . . . You get to enjoy lemonade instead of the lemons God gives you . . . .

Langone was in a tough spot. Home Depot cofounders, employees, and existing investors were all counting on him to remove the IPO roadblocks before the deadline. He was in a high-pressure situation, and he kept pushing. He focused on figuring out how to accomplish the goal given the hand they’d been dealt. His solution was unorthodox but ended up working. Absent Langone’s persistence and resourcefulness, Home Depot might not have gone public in 1981 or, worse, survived.

A few weeks ago, a friend suggested that I learn about the founding of Home Depot, since I’m in Atlanta. I did, and one of the cofounders wasn’t what I expected. His name is Ken Langone. He’s a colorful character from humble beginnings, a hybrid between entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and investment banker. I watched a few YouTube videos of him and got more interested in his story.

I discovered that Langone wrote a book called I Love Capitalism!: An American Story. It’s about his life and adventures in business. I bought it as soon as I found it and started reading. I’m not finished yet, but so far I’m enjoying it.

One concept that Langone shares in the book is over-delivering to cement relationships. Langone was the banker who IPO’d Ross Perot’s company, Electric Data Systems (EDS), in 1968. Langone had never taken a company public before and had a lot riding on the EDS IPO being successful. He thought highly of Perot. He wanted this transaction to be a success, and he also wanted to build a long-term relationship with Perot. Because of EDS’s uniqueness and growth potential, he was sure the public markets would be receptive to the IPO. He told Perot he could take EDS public at 100 times earnings (a number far higher than other bankers thought possible), or $15 per share.

The IPO was a success, and Langone was able to deliver Perot 115 times earnings, or $16.50 per share. Perot was ecstatic. He publicly praised Langone whenever the opportunity arose. Perot’s praise and the publicity about the EDS IPO got Langone a flood of new business. It also cemented his relationship with Perot because he far exceeded Perot’s lofty expectations.

Langone watched others over-promise and under-deliver. They’d close a transaction but ruin relationships because they’d lost people’s trust. Langone didn’t want to ruin relationships, so he took a different approach. To build a relationship and trust, he set what he thought were reasonable expectations and worked doggedly to over-deliver.

Fun fact: Because of Perot’s relationship with Langone, Perot was one of the first people who got the chance to invest in Home Depot when it was an early-stage company in 1978. Perot came close to investing $2 million and would have owned 70% of Home Depot if the transaction had been completed. As of the writing of this post, Home Depot has a market cap (i.e., valuation) of roughly $375 billion.

This weekend I began reviewing some of the highlights in books I’ve read. I realized that I have a lot of physical books with highlights. The best ideas I’ve read are scattered across tons of physical books, which adds friction to my goal of regularly reviewing the best ideas from these books.

Having my highlights centralized in one digital repository that I can access from my phone would be valuable. I’ve been playing with a reading app that does this, but the process of getting text from a book into the app isn’t efficient. I must take a picture of each highlight, which the app converts to text. The conversion is suboptimal, so then I have to correct the text before storing the highlight. Once the highlight is digitized it’s great, but getting to that point is painful.

If I want to regularly review the important concepts from what I’ve read, I’ll need to either find a better way to digitize highlights from physical books or read digital books (e.g., on Kindle). I enjoy physical books, so the former is my preference.

I read a quote this weekend from Charlie Munger that got me thinking:

I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent, but they are learning machines. They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were when they got up and boy does that help, particularly when you have a long run ahead of you.

I believe what Charlie is getting at is that continual learning increases your chances of success in the long run. Learning leads to acquiring wisdom, which improves decision-making and changes behavior. Knowing what to do and when to do it increases your chances of achieving your goals in the long run. Regular learning is something the average person can do to achieve outsize results.

From my learning survey results, I see a desire among driven people to learn and achieve their goals. But I see lots of friction along the path to the wisdom that helps improve their decisions and actions. I’m wondering if some of that friction could be removed and what impact that would have on these people’s lives. Would it materially improve their lives long term?