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?
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.
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?
- 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)
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.
“Is this person going to help me to invest in companies that I otherwise would not have invested in without him/her?”
How do you do this?
Why will you see great deals?
- You worked at Stripe or Palantir and run their alumni group (Company)
- You went to MIT and ran their on campus fund (College)
- You ran Waterloo’s startup community and you know all the great projects (Location)
- You host the signature AR/VR conference (Vertical network)
- You run a community like "Interact"—top technologists under 25 (Horizontal network)
- You’re the best writer in, say, crypto—or more specifically, privacy coins (Legible expertise)
- You worked at Product Hunt or in journalism (can help startups with distribution/PR)
- You host "The 20 min VC" (can help startups raise money)
- You run a podcast called "The 20 min Blockchain Engineer" (can help startups recruit)
Here are other things you can do to add value to VC firms:
1. Send them good deals
2. Send their companies customers or talent
3. Invite partners on your podcast or to your event (or any of the assets mentioned above)
How do you get access to customers in the first place? Host a VP of Sales Event once a quarter, or an event for another core buying audience.
Talent? Start a job board site for engineers, or a regular happy hour for top designers.
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A THREAD ON @SarangSood
Decoded his way of analysis/logics for everyone to easily understand.
Have covered:
1. Analysis of volatility, how to foresee/signs.
2. Workbook
3. When to sell options
4. Diff category of days
5. How movement of option prices tell us what will happen
1. Keeps following volatility super closely.
Makes 7-8 different strategies to give him a sense of what's going on.
Whichever gives highest profit he trades in.
2. Theta falls when market moves.
Falls where market is headed towards not on our original position.
3. If you're an options seller then sell only when volatility is dropping, there is a high probability of you making the right trade and getting profit as a result
He believes in a market operator, if market mover sells volatility Sarang Sir joins him.
4. Theta decay vs Fall in vega
Sell when Vega is falling rather than for theta decay. You won't be trapped and higher probability of making profit.
Decoded his way of analysis/logics for everyone to easily understand.
Have covered:
1. Analysis of volatility, how to foresee/signs.
2. Workbook
3. When to sell options
4. Diff category of days
5. How movement of option prices tell us what will happen
1. Keeps following volatility super closely.
Makes 7-8 different strategies to give him a sense of what's going on.
Whichever gives highest profit he trades in.
I am quite different from your style. I follow the market's volatility very closely. I have mock positions in 7-8 different strategies which allows me to stay connected. Whichever gives best profit is usually the one i trade in.
— Sarang Sood (@SarangSood) August 13, 2019
2. Theta falls when market moves.
Falls where market is headed towards not on our original position.
Anilji most of the time these days Theta only falls when market moves. So the Theta actually falls where market has moved to, not where our position was in the first place. By shifting we can come close to capturing the Theta fall but not always.
— Sarang Sood (@SarangSood) June 24, 2019
3. If you're an options seller then sell only when volatility is dropping, there is a high probability of you making the right trade and getting profit as a result
He believes in a market operator, if market mover sells volatility Sarang Sir joins him.
This week has been great so far. The main aim is to be in the right side of the volatility, rest the market will reward.
— Sarang Sood (@SarangSood) July 3, 2019
4. Theta decay vs Fall in vega
Sell when Vega is falling rather than for theta decay. You won't be trapped and higher probability of making profit.
There is a difference between theta decay & fall in vega. Decay is certain but there is no guaranteed profit as delta moves can increase cost. Fall in vega on the other hand is backed by a powerful force that sells options and gives handsome returns. Our job is to identify them.
— Sarang Sood (@SarangSood) February 12, 2020
The entire discussion around Facebook’s disclosures of what happened in 2016 is very frustrating. No exec stopped any investigations, but there were a lot of heated discussions about what to publish and when.
In the spring and summer of 2016, as reported by the Times, activity we traced to GRU was reported to the FBI. This was the standard model of interaction companies used for nation-state attacks against likely US targeted.
In the Spring of 2017, after a deep dive into the Fake News phenomena, the security team wanted to publish an update that covered what we had learned. At this point, we didn’t have any advertising content or the big IRA cluster, but we did know about the GRU model.
This report when through dozens of edits as different equities were represented. I did not have any meetings with Sheryl on the paper, but I can’t speak to whether she was in the loop with my higher-ups.
In the end, the difficult question of attribution was settled by us pointing to the DNI report instead of saying Russia or GRU directly. In my pre-briefs with members of Congress, I made it clear that we believed this action was GRU.
The story doesn\u2019t say you were told not to... it says you did so without approval and they tried to obfuscate what you found. Is that true?
— Sarah Frier (@sarahfrier) November 15, 2018
In the spring and summer of 2016, as reported by the Times, activity we traced to GRU was reported to the FBI. This was the standard model of interaction companies used for nation-state attacks against likely US targeted.
In the Spring of 2017, after a deep dive into the Fake News phenomena, the security team wanted to publish an update that covered what we had learned. At this point, we didn’t have any advertising content or the big IRA cluster, but we did know about the GRU model.
This report when through dozens of edits as different equities were represented. I did not have any meetings with Sheryl on the paper, but I can’t speak to whether she was in the loop with my higher-ups.
In the end, the difficult question of attribution was settled by us pointing to the DNI report instead of saying Russia or GRU directly. In my pre-briefs with members of Congress, I made it clear that we believed this action was GRU.