Mohamed Zemmourine retweeted
The curse of discipline is that every day looks the same. The curse of indiscipline is that every year does.
Mohamed Zemmourine retweeted
Note to my younger self, though it applies at any age:
Over your life, there are going to be thousands of times that you get triggered — something happens that makes you feel insecure, anxious, jealous, threatened, etc
How you respond is going to determine the quality of your relationships.
If you build your emotional capacity and resilience by learning how to move through the feelings without dumping them on others, your relationships will have much more safety and trust and connection.
The more offended you are and the more you respond from that insecure or entitled place, the more you are going to push people away even though your desire is the exact opposite.
When you do inevitably get into conflict, every conflict you have could be the seed of resentment and bitterness, or the seed for more connection and a better solution.
That’s what I would have tried to master much earlier in life — how to build more emotional capacity so that I don’t act in ways that bring me further away from people and how to have a conflict in ways that bring me closer to them instead. This is something that you can learn intellectually, but you also need to learn it emotionally to be able to use it when you really need it.
Mohamed Zemmourine retweeted
This is the source of so much inconsistency in human reasoning, as it baffles with ontology. That’s also, funny enough, why arbitrary assumed positions will always be more effective and admirable.
Great entrepreneurs are prophets with a vision that they penetrate the world with and force into being. Brutally.
The rest are hand-waving while pretending to pure objectivity, while no one really knows what the fuck is going on.
Mohamed Zemmourine retweeted
Good read below, here’s how we thought about it
Highly concentrated approach (~10-15 investments) at seed feels like the wrong strategy for most funds. IMO it requires a level of luck that is hard to count on.
I would not sleep well at night with this approach. To make it work, you have to be almost perfectly right. Not just about the founders or the idea, but about timing, market pull, early retention signals, and all the small shifts that happen in the first 18 to 24 months. The truth is that much of a company’s trajectory forms after the first check, when real users and real data show what is working.
Breadth matters. Not “spray and pray,” but enough shots on goal to make it statistically reasonable that you encounter a power law team. And close enough involvement to know when one is emerging.
In our 140M fund, we plan to make around 35 initial investments. That gives us:
• Enough opportunities to see true breakout potential
• The capacity to build real relationships with founders
• And the ability to follow on when the signal becomes clear
With ~10-15 investments, you are effectively betting that you can identify the winners up front. I think that is very hard to do reliably at seed. Too many unknowns.
With ~100-150 investments, you are taking a broad read on the market. There are funds that do this well. It is just not the strategy for us because it makes real involvement harder and we value the hands-on part of company building.
~35 sits in the middle. The math of power laws still works, and the work with founders is still personal.
Our goal is to start with ownership that matters, stay close during the messy early phase, and lean in when momentum becomes real.
But there are so many different paths to success (and failure) in this business!
Here it is: signatureblock.co/articles/s…
Guest post by @stefanobernardi with a colorful table on fund concentration.
Mohamed Zemmourine retweeted
the function of your professional life is to find the most natural structure that allows you to turn the things you do as naturally as breathing and walking into compounding capital and enjoyment over decades
that might be a venture backed company.. but i would bet its not
Mohamed Zemmourine retweeted
the greatest regret i have is underestimating the value of long term compounding.
capital, friendships, projects, places, all get better with decades. its impossible to understand until you see it. it is entirely what life is about. a few very good things for a long time
Mohamed Zemmourine retweeted
Alright you dweebs, listen up. Klarna’s going public, Stripe had an up round, and B*tcoin is back up.
Free money comes next, so let’s not screw it up this time. Flying cars, cancer cures, and brain computers. No sh*tcoins, no pump and dumps.
Mohamed Zemmourine retweeted
working at a big company is basically an accelerated course in how power actually works. once you see the sheer level of inefficiency, rent-seeking, & arbitrary decision-making, it kind of breaks all illusions about big companies.
the best part is realizing that half the people in charge have no clue what they’re doing but just sound confident. once you internalize that, you stop overestimating the competition & start realizing that most barriers to entry are just psychological.
Mohamed Zemmourine retweeted
10/25: Fundamentalists believe that financials matter because a company’s enterprise value will eventually collapse to a function of margin, volatility, profit and growth. Revolutionaries believe that dominance is the goal and financials will follow.
Mohamed Zemmourine retweeted
Life is supply and demand but that's no way to live. A third leg is needed to keep the table from collapsing into the garbage pit of history.
Mohamed Zemmourine retweeted
Because why shouldn’t Porsche own a consulting company that advises pasta factories?
People forget that designing and manufacturing sports cars is essentially the same as dry pasta
(Yes this is real)
Mohamed Zemmourine retweeted
Yes, growth has features of an ideology, perhaps the most important ideology of the 20th century. But action informed or rationalized by an ideology is not ipso facto bad. From James Gustave Speth:
This Post is from an account that no longer exists. Learn more
Windmills went from being depicted as satanic in Dante’s Inferno, to symbols of prosperity by the 19th century, see Robert Louis Stevenson
Why?
Vested interests, as feudal landowners attempted to preserve their rent
Same with steam engine, electricity, and recently AI doom
ALT The Garden of Earthly Delights by Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch (c 1450-1516)
Mohamed Zemmourine retweeted
“do you think about the roman empire” no dawg i wake up everyday with dread, thinking about the abbasid empire, the siege of baghdad, the obliteration of a golden age, all our books burned, the defunct school of rationalism and how the future of a technocratic empire was robbed from us
instead we got fake youtube scholars yapping about haram
