Venture capital
22 articles tagged venture capital.
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Position F — A Founder Election with a Decade Cap
A sixth position on the timing-and-mechanism question. The estate elects, at death, between settlement at death under the existing reform (Regime 1) and a deferred-realisation regime with a hard ten-year backstop (Regime 2). The taxable transfer remains the death event; Position F changes the collection mechanism and timing, not the underlying tax principle. Drafted as the bounded version of Position B — the version that survives the case-against-B in the publication's timing piece. Originally circulated as Position E; relabelled F because the publication already uses Position E for the reform-as-written reference case.
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The Team Around the Founder — what the IHT reform does to co-founders, early employees, and vested equity holders
Public coverage of the April 2026 reform has focused on the lead founder. A growing technology company is not one founder. The reform sits across a team — co-founders with material stakes, early employees whose vested options compounded across rounds, senior operators with later-stage grants. This piece walks the population the existing pieces have not directly addressed, evaluates the planning levers as they actually apply to that population, and frames the recruiting and retention question this creates for UK technology companies.
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The Race Against Itself — UK fiscal arithmetic, the productivity rescue, and the cohort the country is signalling its willingness to lose
Cross-category piece. The UK's fiscal arithmetic, on most institutional projections, cannot be closed by tax rises or spending cuts alone. The remaining lever is productivity growth. On current evidence, productivity at the scale required runs heavily through a small and globally mobile cohort — AI researchers, deep-tech founders, life-sciences scientists, the engineers and operators around them. The country's policy responses to its fiscal pressure are signalling to that cohort that they should leave. The race is between the productivity rescue arriving in time and the cohort departing fast enough to ensure it does not. Diagnosis presented at full strength. Four counter-positions presented at full strength. The publication's residual lean named.
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VC: most fail, most suffer, some win lots — does society win or lose?
An open question on venture capital. Seven analytical frames in parallel, evidence labelled by strength, anchored in US/UK/EU as a natural experiment. A short prologue addresses the reader directly: the entire messaging environment around venture capital is engineered to make you, specifically, believe you will be the winner. The frames evaluate the system. Evaluating yourself is a different exercise the document cannot do for you.
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From talent to transaction — twenty years inside an accelerator program
The predecessor synthesis on accelerators, useful for readers interested in how accelerators relate to the broader venture-capital ecosystem. Treats acceptance into an accelerator as a structural moment that reshapes a founder's twenty-year arc — the cap table becomes a moral document, mentorship becomes entangled with deal flow, failure is metabolised as portfolio churn, the grammar of relationships changes. Person-by-person ramifications across founders, employees, capital, infrastructure, and the public.
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The 33%
Cooper, Woo and Dunkelberg surveyed 2,994 entrepreneurs in 1988. Thirty-three percent rated their probability of success at one hundred percent. They were not failing at probability theory. They were correctly registering the signal of the messaging environment they were immersed in. This piece is what that means.
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Why Fund Economics Need Overconfident Founders
A typical early-stage venture fund makes about twenty-five investments. Its returns to limited partners depend almost entirely on whether one or two turned out to be extreme outliers. What that math forces, in three steps, is the part this piece is about.
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What the Natural Experiment Shows
The US, UK, and EU run variants of the same venture model under different conditions. Comparing the three lets us ask which features of the system are intrinsic to running a venture model at all, and which are local-design choices that could be different. The line between the two changes what reform is possible.
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Both Halves of the Headline Are True
Venture capital is good for society and bad for most founders. Readers who hear that sentence often assume one of the two halves must be wrong. Both are documented in the empirical literature. The trick of holding them at the same time is the work the longer pieces do; this piece is the door.
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Venture Capital Is Good for Society and Bad for Most Founders
Venture capital is good for society and bad for most founders. Both halves are documented in the empirical literature. Most writing about VC handles one half or the other; this piece handles both.
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The Wrong Winners Write the Books
Founder advice is not only survivor-biased. It is filtered toward the survivors most certain that their outcome was repeatable. The classic survivorship filter is well known: failures do not write the books. Two further filters operate on the survivor cohort itself — and they are what give the recruitment narrative its tone before any individual VC, accelerator, or founder-coach does anything. This piece names all three.
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Common Reactions — VC: substantive critiques and the publication's responses
Six substantive critiques the publication has received on the venture-capital pieces. Where the critique is right, the publication agrees. Where the deep version already treats the point, the publication says so. Where the publication thinks the critique misreads what the pieces are doing, the publication pushes back.
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For Prospective Founders — What the Recruitment Narrative Does Not Say
For a reader weighing whether to enter the venture system as a founder, an early employee, or an investor of personal savings into venture funds. The strongest single argument the publication has on this topic, made as its own piece because it deserves to. With primary sources you can verify.
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The reality of being a founder — what the data actually says
Most of what is published about being a founder is recruitment material — accurate enough on the survivors, silent on the rest. This is the picture you would see if the data were not filtered. Most fail. Mental-health conditions are more common in the population than in the comparison group. Both halves are well-replicated. With primary sources you can verify.
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The Power Law and What It Forces
Returns to venture investments follow a power-law distribution: a small number of extreme outliers carry the whole. From that single empirical fact, the moral pattern of the venture system — the deal-flow imperative, the rejection of the merely-good, the founder selection criteria, the recruitment narrative — falls out as a structural consequence, not a choice anyone made. The piece sets out the chain in five steps and then asks what would change the pattern if the math changed.
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VC across the US, UK, and EU — a jurisdictional reference for prospective founders
The operational counterpart to the main analytical piece. Side-by-side comparison of structural features (LP base, founder tax regimes, exit market depth, employee equity treatment, 2025-2026 regulatory changes) across the US, UK, and the major EU venture markets. Practical reference for founders deciding where to incorporate, fundraise, or relocate. May 2026 snapshot.
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For UK Tech Founders
Addressed to a UK tech founder reading this on the train. You hold significant unlisted shares in a UK trading company. The April 2026 reform changes what happens to those shares if you die. This piece is for you specifically.
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Where to Start — A Reading Guide
The publication has four sections: the April 2026 UK IHT reform analysis, a body of work on venture capital, a seven-document set on whether to industrialise Mars, and a single Notebook piece outside the analytical register. One entry-point recommended for each kind of reader.
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Eight Hours, Four AI Tools, One Founder — and Four Weeks of Practice Behind It
This publication came together in roughly eight hours of real work — at the fast end of four weeks of intensive AI-tool-assisted work that has spanned websites, code, books, and The Many Builders. Same person, same tools, very different outputs at very different intensities. The honest version of what happened, what it implies, and what it does not.
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What the Inheritance Tax Reform Means for UK Tech
A plain English explainer for founders, angels, VCs, and the people who fund and build UK tech companies.
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UK Tech and the IHT Reform — The Funding Stack and the Fiscal Model
Technical depth on each part of the UK tech funding stack — founders, angels, VCs, PE, EIS, LPs, early employees — and a 25-year fiscal model of what each policy option means for the Treasury, including second-order effects.
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Inheritance Tax and the UK Tech Cohort
What is being argued, what the disagreement turns on, and what different evidence would mean — for the founders, investors, and operators driving the new economy.