IEX - soaring ahead in terms of business potential. A great platform stock to own. Power trading is only to increase in India.

D: holding in personal portfolio.

1/ Someone emailed me asking how to break into VC, so I wanted to answer on Twitter where others could see and contribute to the conversation.

2/ “Being a VC” can mean a lot of different things, so it’s worth asking:

What actual activities do you want to do?

- Deep market analysis?
- Be in the flow of information and people?
- Make deals?
- Work closely w/ founders over time (e.g take board seats?)
- Manage capital?

3/ It’s worth specifying what type of VC you might like to become — as there are different archetypes. E.g.

- Benchmark (Lead series A/B - couple investments a year)
- First Round (Lead seed rounds, partner w/ a few companies a year)
- SV Angel (Make lots of seed investments)

4/ Continued:

Expa - Incubate companies

YC / Village Global - Build a platform to help entrepreneurs at scale

Do you want to join a firm or start one? There’s a lot to consider.

Different paths will require different skillsets & sets of experiences.

5/ Since the person who wrote the email is a young person trying to break into VC by joining a firm (and who doesn’t want to start a company), I’ll tailor this tweet storm to that goal. There’s some overlap.

Rio de Janeiro, 1920. 🇧🇷

São Paulo, 1910. 🇧🇷

“Arpoador”, Rio de Janeiro, 1900. 🇧🇷

“Avenida Paulista”, São Paulo, 1902. 🇧🇷

Recife, 1885. 🇧🇷

You want to buy a house.

You take a loan from the bank.

The bank asks you, “what if you don’t pay back?”

You say, “take my home and sell it”.

(Thread)

That makes sense. The bank gives you a loan and in case you don’t pay, the bank will take over your house and sell it and recover its money.

That’s collateral.

Banks also lend money to big corporations. With them, banks don’t always have collateral.

So a loan where the bank has collateral is considered safer for the bank.

In the early 2000s, the banks in the USA were giving out loans to people for buying houses.

The economy had just recovered from the tech bubble in 2000 where many banks had given out loans to businesses that had shut down.

In that backdrop, the banks found giving home loans safer.