# Investment Philosophy Related Articles

HTX News Center provides the latest articles and in-depth analysis on "Investment Philosophy", covering market trends, project updates, tech developments, and regulatory policies in the crypto industry.

If It's Not a Clear Yes, It's a No: A Nine-Year Retrospective by a VC Who Survived Four Cycles

**"Invest Only When Certain": A Nine-Year Retrospective from a VC Across Four Cycles** IOSG founder Jocy shares hard-earned lessons from nine years and over a hundred investments in Web3. The core challenge isn't identifying successful founders, but understanding why talented founders with solid ideas still fail. Through building a "failed founder database," IOSG identified six recurring failure patterns. **Founder Trait Red Flags:** 1. **Emotionally Unstable:** Founders who react defensively to criticism or publicly lash out under pressure (e.g., 80% drawdowns) often fail. Resilience is key. 2. **Lacking Hunger / Having a Fallback:** Founders with significant safety nets (family wealth, cushy fallback jobs) may lack the "do-or-die" commitment needed to survive crypto's brutal cycles. 3. **Unchecked Ego:** Includes "polished execution machines" who excel in known frameworks but struggle when paradigms shift, and "professor-types" who are technically brilliant but resistant to commercial feedback or coaching. **Project Structure Red Flags:** 4. **Token-First, Not Product-First:** Treating the token solely as a fundraising tool with no real utility or connection to product value is a major warning sign. The project should have value even if the token goes to zero. 5. **No Day-1 Exit Thesis:** Founders must have a clear, staged capital strategy from the start, understanding what each funding round needs to prove to unlock the next. "Exit before entry" is crucial. 6. **No Full-Cycle Experience:** Founders who haven't lived through a complete crypto bull/bear cycle (e.g., 2018, 2022) often underestimate their vulnerability. IOSG limits initial checks for such teams to $250k, sizing for risk. **The Positive Flipside: Desirable Founder Traits** The ideal candidate exhibits: obsessive problem-depth, being a second-time founder with a non-consensus vision, strong communication skills with *controlled* ego, relentless perseverance, and a global perspective with agency and taste (increasingly vital in the AI era). **Three Survival Tips for Founders:** 1. **Cash Flow Over Narrative:** Real revenue is what sustains projects, not vanity metrics. 2. **Tokens Are a Liability:** Avoid issuing a token unless absolutely necessary. The hidden costs (market making, liquidity, compliance) are immense, often a multi-million-dollar burden. 3. **Respect Liquidity:** Sell during peaks to build treasury, buy back to support the protocol during troughs. Be realistic about valuations and your ability to deliver for the next round. The final principle is simple yet paramount: **"If it's a borderline 'yes' or 'no,' don't invest."** In an industry that reinvents itself every few years, the discipline to consistently say "no" is the ultimate secret to longevity.

Foresight News06/24 07:46

If It's Not a Clear Yes, It's a No: A Nine-Year Retrospective by a VC Who Survived Four Cycles

Foresight News06/24 07:46

Bezos, Schmidt, Powell Jobs: The Three AI Investment Philosophies of Silicon Valley's Old Money

Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt, and Laurene Powell Jobs, three prominent figures from Silicon Valley's "old money," are deploying massive personal fortunes into AI, but with distinctly different investment philosophies reflecting their visions for the future. Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO, approaches AI as a geopolitical and infrastructural arms race. Through his family office, Hillspire, he invests heavily in defense AI companies, energy infrastructure (like Bolt Data & Energy to power data centers), and space launch capabilities (Relativity Space). For Schmidt, the ultimate AI advantage lies in physical resources—energy, transport, and military application—framing it as a national competition requiring state-level strategy and endurance. Jeff Bezos is building a vertically integrated, full-stack AI empire. His bets span the model layer (via Amazon's massive investment in Anthropic), the application layer (through investments like Perplexity), and now, the physical execution layer. His new venture, Project Prometheus, with $6.2 billion, aims to inject AI into manufacturing, creating a closed loop from AI chips and cloud compute (AWS) to real-world production, potentially for Amazon's own ventures like the Kuiper satellite network. In contrast, Laurene Powell Jobs adopts a more subtle, human-centric approach through her Emerson Collective. Her AI investments focus on specific, positive-impact applications—such as AI for healthcare (Proximie, Atropos Health), education (Curipod), and European AI sovereignty (Mistral AI). A key, high-profile bet was her early backing of Jony Ive's design firm LoveFrom and its spin-off, io, an AI hardware device company later acquired by OpenAI. Her philosophy prioritizes improving human-machine interaction and addressing societal needs over sheer scale or control. These three strategies—Schmidt's focus on state-level infrastructure and security, Bezos's pursuit of end-to-end industrial integration, and Powell Jobs's emphasis on human-centered design and applied solutions—represent fundamentally different wagers on what will define the next decade of AI. While the eventual winner is unknown, the sheer scale of this capital migration from internet-era giants is already reshaping the industry's trajectory.

marsbit05/14 08:11