Week 13 – A Founder guide to VC diligence

Hi Reader,

I'm back from a long trip in the US and enjoying all the new content out there. From a Mars podcast to a novel theory of personal career moats, content is not just becoming more relevant and targeted, it's also significantly more entertaining. I tuned in to the Masters of Scale podcast and was amazed about the level of production effort involved.

With more newsletters coming out, you need a way to manage them. I recently moved my newsletter subscriptions to Stoop, a new app that does the obvious: it provides you with a new e-mail address and subscribes you to newsletters. Like Macaw, the Twitter client that helps you surface the most liked tweets in your network, it's an emerging tool for better curation.

🐦 Tech (mainly) tweets I'm reading

Erik Torenberg expands with a thread on career moats.
Michael Nielsen shares his favorite reading lists.
Ryan Selkis reminds us that the bravest people working in a start-up are the early recruits.

📉 Investing

How to Diligence your VCs is a playbook for Founders by Zak Kukoff also serving as a useful template for investors. As the industry reaches equilibrium, the days of exploitative VCs are over and investors need to become value adding participants in the business.

📚Lifelong education

Make School gets accreditation for a 2-year CS degree. This program can become a financially advantageous option for many aspiring software engineers. Lack of significant fees combined with the opportunity of working 2 additional years compared to a traditional US degree marks a significant difference.

For the rest of us, I expect we will have more options to consider than Harvard and Stanford for continuing education. I would love to see creative implementations of EMBA programs or hard-skills degrees in topics like design.

🚀 Interplanetary travel

On a mission is a new podcast about Mars from NASA. I'm looking forward to diving in and learning more about NASA's perspective.

Our institutions, companies and media have been preparing us for the Red Planet for a little while with movies like the Martian, series like Lost in Space and Star Trek Discovery.

Another excellent podcast about Mars is the related season from Anatomy of Next by Founders Fund.

It's a great time to be alive.