After 10+ years building and investing in startups, I’ve realized that when it comes to company building, I’m more Chris Paul than Kobe. That is, I’m more playmaker than scorer.

In basketball, playmakers see plays before they happen, prod the defense for space to attack, and set up teammates to score.

In startups, playmakers partner with founders to create space (traction) and find driving lanes (roadmaps, p/m fit) within their ambitious and often broad visions/sector insights. Those founder/CEOs go on to build/scale big businesses (i.e. score the ball), but the playmaker stays in the backcourt finding the next driving lane to attack and scorer to partner with.

For me, those founders have been people like Shivani from Tala and Matt from Bloom Credit. I partnered with them in the earliest of days to turn their broad visions into specific product experiments, navigate those experiments into p/m fit, and then raise capital/recruit the right team before stepping away. It’s the work I enjoy the most — and the formula where I’ve had the most success.

This introspection is a helpful guide for me in plotting my future moves, but it’s also unlocked an insight into traditional startup studio models that I’m exploring. Startup studios centralize the process of new venture incubation by consolidating the essence of playmaking into either a central studio that creates/spins out companies itself or value-added platform’ that seeks to attract entrepreneurs nurturing nascent ideas. Looking at my traits and trackrecord as an individual ‘playmaker’, and extrapolating to other types of playmakers (e.g. the enterprise guru who’s a master of getting SaaS companies their first beta customers), I think there’s an opportunity to decentralize the studio model through a new kind of ‘playmaker’-focused’ venture fund. I’m calling this idea a “Start Fund.

Simply put, Start Funds enable individual playmakers to do what they do best — co-found businesses in partnership with mission-obsessed scorers/founders — but maximize their economics in doing so. Namely, a Start Fund provides a playmaker the ability to build a small, concentrated portfolio over 2-3 year period, invest meaningful capital at inception, and go full-time for 6-8 months on individual companies prior to a full raise.

On the founder side, because each Start Fund is tied to just one playmaker (the GP), it’s a much simpler question/value prop to consider i.e. “Do I want to co-found a company with this specific person I know/have met? vs. “Do I think this studio provides sufficient value to warrant the equity they’re asking?”.

There’s a lot more I can share (e.g. specifics on fund structure, return thesis for LPs, value to entrepreneurs), but will save that for a later time. In the meantime, I’d love to hear from folks that find resonance with this notion of a ‘playmaker’ and the decentralized startup studio model that it could unlock.

It’s been more than two years since I worked on Mural full-time, but it’s continued to grow steadily (albeit slowly) mostly on its own. As of today, users have added 6k+ pieces of knowledge work (e.g. product specs, strategy docs, content maps) to their Murals. This is obviously not a huge number, but it is pretty remarkable how high-quality much of this work is — including helpful templates and examples for others to use.

Earlier this year, we took our first step to making this graph of knowledge work accessible to others by featuring the best examples on our newly launched Workshop.

We’re now looking to test a new paid feature, Elevate, that will enable users to get their Murals (or an individual work product therein) scored/reviewed by a panel of experts in their field -- and receive personalized feedback and advice in the process. While Workshop was the first time we made content added to Murals accessible to other Mural users, Elevate will be the first time we guarantee a robust feedback loop on content added to Mural.

Elevate is still a WIP in progress, but you can get an early look here. Welcome any thoughts/questions/feedback — and if you’re interested in being a panel expert for any specific field/area of expertise (e.g. product management), let me know!

A few years ago, I kicked around the idea of a ‘nomad school’ idea for aspiring/current digital nomads with families — and even pitched it to the fine folks at Lego Ventures. While we ultimately decided not to pursue it at the time, the post-Pandemic (fingers crossed!) zeitgeist of the moment has me thinking about it again.

You can follow my latest thinking on it here and a get fuller sense of the original idea here.

Tinkering with a Smart-Contract POwered Solution for crowdsourced Research

A few months ago, I was looking for a list of playgrounds in NYC with hoops under 9ft for my basketball obsessed 5 yo. I couldn’t find anything of help on this, and began to wonder if this was an example of the kind of work that a market-based (crypto) incentive could spur into existence.

Put simply, is there a cypto version of Quora or Foursquare (e.g. Lists), or any mkt that rewards crowdsourced research based on how popular/used it is, that could do this? There is so much local intelligence that goes under-reported and thus local assets that go underutilized as a result.

My friend Mark and I are diving into this together — using this specific ask of a list of playgrounds in NYC with hoops under 9ft as a helpful constraint to prototype with. You can follow our thinking here (needs an update) — and welcome any thoughts/questions/etc.!