Welcome to Venture Patterns.
Venture Patterns is a website for VCs, startup managers, founders, and people interested in understanding the innovation economy. My goal is to provide what amounts to a “best of” catalog of some of the best advice, lessons, insights, or innovations that can be useful to founders and venture capitalists (VCs) alike.
I hope startup managers and VCs develop more understanding of one another, and, in doing so, a strong spirit of collaboration and transparency.
Patterns mean recurring strategies or ways of thinking about the world. To date, I have taken a primarily descriptive approach in identifying, naming, and comparing and contrasting patterns. The pattern list can be used as a catalog for understanding and also for implementation.
Venture Patterns is inspired by a number of excellent books and websites. This includes “Design Patterns”, “Super Thinking”, “Great Mental Models”, and Farnam Street, among others. These other projects catalog the patterns in decisionmaking, software engineering, and other fields.
I am motivated by my work as an entrepreneur, investor, and educator. I started three companies and previously ran a public company. On the other side of the table, I have also been a VC and an angel investor. And finally, I am a Kauffman Fellow in venture capital and taught at the Yale School of Management. You can read more about me here.
On this blog, you will five types of content:
- Pattern Entry: Short descriptions of one “pattern” or “mental model” that can be useful in understanding startups and venture capital. We will look at possible benefits and tradeoffs and then compare it with other patterns
- Summaries: A succinct digest of the best ideas from other publications
- Essays: Long-form advice and analysis of trends
- Questions: A list of open questions I’m using to explore a topic. I invite your input.
- Book Review: occasional reviews of relevant books.
Through these five forms of content, I am striving to make Venture Patterns as close to a mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive (MECE) list of VC and startup principles as possible. And I am also hoping that this website can be a step toward improving dialogue between VCs and founders, kindling conversations that can reshape the way we approach innovation.
Here is Venture Pattern by the numbers:
- 15 tips on generating startup ideas
- 65+ topics for VCs (including 17 sourcing strategies and more coming)
- 25+ startup topics (with more coming)
- 4 entries on alternatives, complaints, and anti-patterns (Anti-patterns are common behaviors or strategies but are ineffective, counterproductive and/or immoral.)
- 3 “Question” posts
- 4 “Essay” posts
- A diverse group of 600 readers a month
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Thank you for reading.