Today Bloomberg reported that Tiger Global and Accel sold their remaining stakes in Indian e‑commerce company Flipkart in a $1.4+ billion transaction. The acquirer was Walmart, who had purchased a 77% controlling stake in Flipkart in 2018 for $16 billion. The transaction was completed at a reported $35 billion, down from the $38 billion in Flipkart’s 2021 funding round.

I don’t have any insider information on this deal or this company’s metrics, but it appears that Tiger Global first invested in Flipkart’s 2009 Series B round by investing $8.6 million at a $42 million valuation. In subsequent years, it invested an additional $1.2 billion. It began exiting its position in 2017 when it sold part of its investment to Softbank, and it then sold more to Walmart in 2018. Tiger is reported to have made $3.5 billion in profits on its investments in Flipkart.

This is a large secondary transaction and likely will allow Tiger to provide LPs in its prior funds with much-desired liquidity.

I’m curious to see whether this transaction is a one-off or we’ll start to see more VCs get liquidity by selling stakes in growth-stage companies to large corporations.

All last week, I thought about how to solve a problem. I felt like I was missing something, but I couldn’t figure out what I was missing or how to solve the problem.

I called a good friend from college to vent and get his opinion. He’s in a totally different field than I am and sees things from a different perspective, which I value. Over the next hour he gave me feedback on my thinking, and we talked through various ideas. Eventually, we landed on an insight that felt significant. We searched for data to support or contradict it. The data supported our thinking, and we realized that we’d uncovered what could be an important insight. Now I’m excited to dig into this key insight this upcoming week.

Knowing credible people with diverse perspectives whom I can call is helpful. These sounding boards can accelerate good thinking, highlight flawed thinking, or help me formulate unique insights.

Some founders take the approach of shielding their teams from the realities their start-up faces. They want the team focused on building a great solution and serving customers. I caught up with an early-stage founder who recently updated his small team on strategic direction and the state of the company during a team meeting. He decided to leave their current runway out of his update because he didn’t want them to worry.

They didn’t let that slide, though. One of the first questions was how much runway they had to execute what they’d just heard. Having been asked, the founder answered candidly: four or five months to make it happen.

The founder wasn’t sure how the team would respond to such a short runway. He assumed some would worry. Their responses surprised him:

• “Thank you for being transparent.”
• “I was giving 100%, but now I’m going to give 120%.”
• “I did the calculation on my equity, and if this works like we think it will, I’ll make a lot of money, so I’m going to do all I can to make it work.”

This founder learned that he doesn’t have to shield his team from the unpleasant realities of working at a start-up. People don’t expect everything to be roses. They know start-ups will have ups and downs. They want to be kept in the loop, good or bad. Sometimes, sharing the bad can energize the team to push harder to make the impossible happen.

This is my one-hundred-seventy-fourth weekly reflection. Here are my takeaways from this week:

• Sounding boards – It’s helpful to have smart, credible people to get candid feedback from and share ideas with. Sometimes they can accelerate good thought processes or highlight flawed thinking.
• Knowledge costs – Knowledge is never free. There’s always a cost. Everyone pays tuition (time, energy, or money). If you want knowledge, get comfortable with the idea of paying tuition and identify the form of payment that suits you.

Week one hundred seventy-four was a week of learning. Looking forward to next week!

Over the past few months, I’ve listened to a few early-stage founders pitch marketplace start-ups. Their pitch begins with a focus on connecting buyers and sellers. During the pitch they also say they have tools to help sellers, who are small businesses, manage their operations. They’re building marketplaces with workflow management embedded in V1 of their solutions.

This approach gives me pause because I struggle to understand the core problem they’re solving. Are they solving the inability of buyers and sellers to connect? Or are they helping small sellers manage their business operations?

Many of these founders point to large marketplaces (Airbnb, Etsy, etc.) as having inspired them. These mature marketplaces offer workflow management tools to sellers, so the early-stage founders believe they should build these features too. But mature marketplaces didn’t offer workflow management to sellers from the get-go. They solved their core problem (connecting buyers and sellers) first. After they achieved product–market fit and looked at scaling the platform, they added workflow management features. If they had done both at the same time, I’m not sure they would have had the same level of success.

Building a marketplace and achieving product–market fit is really hard. Getting the supply and demand dynamics to work is no small task. Early-stage founders should be crystal clear on the core problem they’re solving and allocate resources to build the best possible solution to solve that problem before building additional features that don’t solve the core problem.

One of my personal goals is to acquire knowledge daily. I focus on knowledge related to concepts I want to better understand so I can attempt to develop unique insights about them.

One of my favorite tools for consuming knowledge is YouTube. I subscribe to the premium membership to avoid ads and to access extra features. I start by deciding what concept I want to understand better. Then I identify people who have a deep understanding of it and search for videos of them sharing their knowledge. I add those videos to my watch list. During my daily treadmill walk, I watch these videos (usually at 1.5X speed to challenge myself). I’ve found that consuming videos while walking is the best fit for me. It feels productive, as I’m exercising and learning at the same time.

I’m a fan of the YouTube platform. It’s been a helpful tool in my quest to learn daily.

I’m a pretty even-keeled person. A friend recently asked how I’m able to stay so calm in most situations. Part of it is my personality and upbringing. But also, I’ve learned to quickly filter out things others may choose to worry about—specifically, things outside my control.

When I encounter something that could be worrisome, I ask myself, “Is this within my control?” If the answer is no, I simply don’t worry about it. It doesn’t make sense to waste my mental real estate or time on something I have zero control over. I can’t influence the outcome, so I shouldn’t worry about it. That doesn’t mean that I’m not aware of it or that I ignore it. I take note of the situation, but I don’t go further than that.

Not worrying about things I can’t control is a helpful mental trick that’s allowed me to allocate more mental bandwidth to what matters most: things I can control.

I caught up with a friend who’s working for an investment firm in New York City. In a wide-ranging conversation, we compared housing and transportation costs in New York and surrounding cities with those in Atlanta. New York is one of the top real estate markets in the world, which factored into my expectations, but what my friend shared today surprised me (especially regarding transportation). The cost of housing in the areas he frequents is still rising significantly, as is the cost of commuting into, around, and out of the city.

It’s one conversation with one friend—anecdotal for sure. But it reminded me how attractive Atlanta is from the perspectives of affordability and quality of life. And this is after the city has experienced some of the worst inflation in the nation.

I’m studying investor entrepreneurs—investors who have an entrepreneurial spirit and found their own investment firms rather than work for someone else. I’m specifically interested in those who’ve had outsize success—meaning they’ve been able to compound their capital at an annual rate that exceeds benchmarks like the S&P 500—for a decade or more.

I’ve noticed that many of these investors are opportunistic—that is, the types of investments they make depend on market conditions. The degree of opportunism varies by investor, but the great ones don’t stick with only one thing.

More importantly, I’ve picked up on a simple framework mentioned by multiple seasoned investors. It’s used to gauge what they should or shouldn’t consider investing in. They look at investments through the lens of supply and demand. If investor demand for an investment is high, its price is often higher and its potential return lower. If demand is low, its price is often lower and its potential return higher. These investors have had outsize success with opportunities for which investor demand was low, resulting in their being materially mispriced.

I like the approach of beginning the investment evaluation process by thinking in terms of supply and demand. It’s simple and can put the investment into perspective quickly.

Fred Wilson is a well-known VC and general partner at Union Square Ventures, which he cofounded in 2003. Earlier this year, he shared his predictions for 2023, which I recapped in this post. This week, he shared his updated thoughts on the venture capital sector.

Here are a few takeaways:

• Venture capital has been in a downturn for roughly eighteen months.
• The NASDAQ peaked at ~16,000 in November 2021.
• The NASDAQ was down ~33% by June 2022 and ended 2022 at ~10,500.
• As of July 14, the NASDAQ was at 14,113—up ~36%.
• Interest rates and inflation are driving the NASDAQ.
• The Fed raised rates aggressively in 2022 because of post-pandemic inflation, causing asset prices to decline.
• Inflation is down now, which means rates may have peaked.
• Expectations drive markets, and inflation and interest expectations have settled down.
• Venture capital lags public markets by a few quarters.
• Venture capital will likely respond to the NASDAQ’s strong 2023 quarters.
• Venture capital may be through its downturn.

Taking a company public has historically been a popular way for investors, founders, and employees of venture-backed companies to get liquidity for their company shares. It makes sense that public markets heavily influence venture capital.

I can’t predict the future, but as Fred said, in the next few quarters we’ll have a better idea of where things are headed.