In my last piece, I made a strong case for why I strongly believe in industry focus and being close to the topic one looks at as an investor, even though having a matching academic degree or operative work experience in the field might not correlate directly with one’s success.
To complement this, I want to share some best practices, tips, and helpful resources that I, and other B2D investors I surveyed, use to boost their technical literacy, better understand the products they are assessing (and potentially investing in), and just generally to stay up to date and keep up with certain hypes 🪄AI🪄.
Don’t let yourself be mocked by this cute scamster Golden Retriever. Don’t be him :)
Reading, reading, reading
Let’s start with the most obvious, basic, and boring(?) thing you can do - read as much as you can and as your schedule allows.
One great reading source I recommend to reactively get sprinkled with new topics, ideas, stories, etc., is newsletters. The biggest mistake to avoid here is probably to not overdo it in terms of the number of newsletters you subscribe to, but rather care to create a curated list of high-quality readings that are relevant to you specifically. Newsletters I enjoy reading are TLDR, Programming Digest, DiscoverDev, and Pragmatic Engineer for B2D-related content and Platformer, or DigitalNative for more general tech-related readings.
Another great channel for reading in my opinion is forums. Not only does it reflect a purer and more unfiltered view of what’s happening, but it also represents the community better than a single opinionated view. Of course, in return, you’ll have to declutter a lot of the unwanted noise to get to what you want.
I feel like I should also propose research papers here to selected topics, specifically around generative AI this was also one key resource for me to stay up to date, but generally it is not the medium I enjoy reading so much so I’d only fall back to it when needed.
Coding, coding, coding
Leaving the theoretical, knowledge-absorbing activity of reading behind, it is now time to make our hands dirty. Or at least to hit the keys. If you have a strong technical background with computer science fundamentals, fun hobby projects might be just the right thing for you to not get rusty, experiment with new technologies, and stay on top of things! For people with more limited technical abilities (like myself) combining such projects with coding boot camps, coding challenges, or even little hackathons can be a more guided alternative to that.
I, for myself, have made a great experience with Codecademy. On the one hand side, the traditional learning paths are a great way to familiarize yourself with the basics, or refresh them when needed, and apply them in a sandboxed environment. On the other hand side, the platform also frequently releases topical mini-courses about trend topics, such as a “Debug Python Code with ChatGPT”. Other content is simply fun and a good way to spend some spare minutes - a personal favorite of mine is the “Analyze Taylor Swift Lyrics with Python” Case.
Practice what you preach
What I mean by this is: try to use the products you are analyzing for a potential investment, and try out the software and tools a founding team is pitching to you. Even when that means just playing around with it without bringing anything noteworthy into production, it will still feel like “a demo on steroids” that can boost your understanding dramatically. It will also form a great basis for discussion for future upcoming discussions with the team or for dedicated follow-on meetings such as tech deep dives. The effort will surely also be appreciated by the team.
Increase your n
Something I learned early on in the investor journey was, whenever in doubt, just “increase your n”. This works well on a higher-level analysis when looking at a whole space, a new trend, or similar. By increasing your n I refer to the exercise of collecting as many data points for something as you can. This will most likely mean talking to as many companies and founders in a segment as you can. While the first LLMOps startup pitch might still sound just as innovative as complex, you’ll be able to form a pretty solid mental model and own framework after you talked to the 20th startup in the space. This will help you form a thesis, be more opinionated about a given trend, and generally just have a prepared mind.
An army of Devs
A frequent saying in VC is: “Network only sucks if you don’t have it.” Now network can be helpful in so many more ways than just sourcing new investment opportunities or gaining access to hot deals.
One dimension of network I heavily lean on is building up a good crowd of outstanding devs. I think of this as having a SWAT team of technical due diligence experts, as well as a selected user group for potential customer feedback, at hand at any time. A group of people that is perfectly suited for this is portfolio company CTOs. Another group I luckily have access to is our internal engineering team. Collecting first impressions, and in-depth feedback after a trial, or also including them in meetings with the team, proved tremendously powerful in making assessments.
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Similar to the rest of the industry I am soon going on a little summer break and will pause writing for some time. See you after the break ☀️