Chief Decision Maker

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This blog has a recurrent theme: I’m interested in corporate policies that organizations may try to foster the culture of innovation. The only requirement for making the cut is that this policy must be specific and actionable (i.e., not just a call to “celebrate failures”). As of today, the list of such policies is very short; it actually includes only two entries.

  1. I propose to make stock option grants, as opposed to cash bonuses and other monetary rewards, the principal incentive for engaging employees in innovation projects.

This proposal is based on a 2015 finding that companies offering stock options to non-executive employees were more innovative, and that the positive effect of stock options on innovation was more pronounced with longer-term grants.

  1. I propose to place employees involved in innovation projects on fixed-term employment contracts, as opposed to employment-at-will. Alternatively, the creation of tenure-like job arrangements for people involved in strategic innovation initiatives can be considered.

This proposal capitalizes on a 2001 study showing that labor laws making difficult to fire employees increase their participation in corporate innovation activities. It was argued that the lower threat of termination produced by stronger anti-dismissal encouraged employees to engage in potentially risky innovation projects.

A recent article in Harvard Business Review prompted me to introduce one more policy to my list. The article author, Simone Ahuja, identifies an important structural barrier preventing corporate intrapreneurs from “owning” their innovative ideas: the decision to proceed with the idea further or terminate it belongs to managers rather than to intrapreneurs. Ahuja then describes a successful corporate policy introduced at Intuit: there, it’s up to individual intrapreneurs to decide “if and when to pull the plug on a project or prototype.” And if they decide to discard the original idea, the intrapreneurs are encouraged to pivot to another solution instead of terminating the project completely.

Sure, I understand that writing off the cost of “failure” when developing software–as opposed to areas where building prototypes requires significant investments–is easier at Intuit that at other companies. And yet, giving individual intrapreneurs the power of decision-making–granting them the status of the Chief Decision Maker, so to speak–provides an enormous boost to fostering the culture of innovation: it eliminates the very word “failure” from the corporate innovation lexicon. For, if it’s your manager who closes your innovation project, it’s failure (no matter what the followers of the “celebrate failure” cult would tell you); but if it’s you who decide when to bury your idea, it is learning.

So, I propose the following addition to my list:

  1. Whenever possible, provide employees involved in innovation projects with fixed budgets and timeframes to conduct validation studies/prototype building while giving them, within defined borders, the authority to be solely responsible for the key project decisions.

In the future, I’ll try to refine the language of the above proposal.

Image credit: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/64668944619099954/

 

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Cloudy Vision, Cloudy Execution

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As every high-quality report on innovation, Accenture’s 2015 U.S. Innovation Survey is a mixed bag of news. On the one hand, responses provided by “500 managers and executives with roles in innovation at large U.S. companies” paint a bright picture of the state of the American corporate innovation. Consider this promising numbers:

  • 74% of the respondents reported having formally established corporate innovation processes
  • 63% of companies are appointing Chief Innovation Officers (a note to those who hastened to bury the poor CINO alive)
  • 85% utilize digital platforms to manage innovation process; 84% practice virtual prototyping; 91% use customers as a source of new ideas.

But here comes the bad news. The study found “that a significant gap exists between what companies want to do in the area of innovation and what they are able to do.” Take a look at the numbers leading to this sobering assertion:

  • 72% of companies miss opportunities to exploit under-developed areas or markets (53% in 2012)
  • 60% admit their companies don’t learn from past mistakes (36% in 2012)
  • 67% believe their organizations are becoming more risk-averse (46% in 2012).

Based on these conflicting trends, the authors of the study gave it a peculiar title: “Innovation: Clear Vision, Cloudy Execution.”

With all due respect to the esteemed Accenture folks, I’d disagree with the first part of their two-pronged heading. My own experience with corporate innovation programs suggests that in very many companies, there is no clear understanding of the very fundamentals of the innovation process: what innovation is (and what it is not), what types of innovation and innovation tools exist and which particular tools are suited for each type of innovation.

Signs of such “unclear vision” are evident in the study itself. For example, 84% of the respondents admit that their organizations prefer chasing “silver-bullet” innovations at the expense of developing a portfolio of opportunities. Yet 72% complain that pursuing “line extensions” takes over “developing totally new products or services.”

Wait a minute! Do these two statements not contradict each other? How can any organization prefer chasing “silver-bullet” innovations and at the same time ignore developing new products and services? Is it not supposed to be the same type of innovation?

This is a sign of a total confusion, not a “clear vision.” Yes, you can establish a formal innovation program, appoint a Chief Innovation Officer and buy a piece of innovation management software. However, if no one responsible for innovation in your organization understands the difference between incremental, “adjacent” and radical innovation (a.k.a. the 3-Horizon Model of Innovation) and is familiar with the concept of Integrative Innovation Management, both your innovation vision and execution will be…well, cloudy.

It appears to me that the C-level executives responsible for corporate innovation are becoming increasingly better at using “correct” innovation vocabulary. Sure, innovation is a top-3 priority for our organization. Sure, we strive for disruptive innovation. Sure, in our organization, innovation is everyone’s job. It’s also automatically assumed that this “vision” is universally shared by the rest of their organizations.

But I keep coming back to another innovation survey, the one sponsored by Wazoku, a UK collaborative idea management software company. In their survey, 85% of respondents too considered innovation important to their companies (exactly the same number as in Accenture’s); yet 72% had no understanding of what innovation meant to them. 53% of surveyed managers were unaware of their organizations’ definition of innovation; 38% of the managers said innovation wasn’t their job.

Clear vision?

So, I have a suggestion for Accenture folks. Next time they run an innovation survey, they poll the same number of people (500). However, instead of posing questions on corporate innovation to 500 of executives working for different companies, Accenture would present the same questions to 500 people working for the same company–at every level of the organizational ladder. I’m sure the results of the survey will surprise Accenture’s analysts.

Image credit: Zdzisław Beksiński (1929-2005) (http://www.lazerhorse.org/2013/05/12/terrifying-visions-hell-murdered-polish-painter/)

 

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I Love You, I Love You Not… (Our short-lived romance with Chief Innovation Officer)

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Oops! It turns out that we don’t love a Chief Innovation Officer anymore. Just a short time ago, Chief Innovation Officers (CINO as per popular abbreviation) were heralded as a new frontier in innovation management. Considered a missing link between the perennially aloof CEO and enthusiastic crowd of innovation rank and file, they have been promoted as a panacea for all corporate innovation ills.

It’s over now. In a recent post, Stefan Lindegaard calls on companies to “shy away from the Chief Innovation Officer role.” Lindegaard’s own prescriptions to improve corporate innovation process are curious though. First, he wants companies to “go all-in on digital” (whatever that means) and replace a CINO with a Chief Digital Officer. Second, he proposes to trash the very term “innovation” and replace it with something else (he suggests “transformation”). OK, now I at least understand why innovation has been difficult for so many organizations for so long: they’ve been using wrong terminology.

George Bradt of Forbes doesn’t like CINOs either: not only he considers CINOs “useless” for the innovation process; he calls them “utterly counterproductive.” His argument is simple: “If one person is in charge of innovation, everyone else are not.”

This is a strange argument. What about other C-level functions? Does the role of the CEO imply that no one in the company can make an executive decision? Does the role of the CMO imply that he or she is the only person involved in marketing efforts? Does the role of the CFO deprive everyone else of fiscal responsibility? Unfortunately, Bradt doesn’t explain what is so unique about the CINO role that it effectively shuts down innovation in the rest of the company.

Bradt’s hostility towards CINOs seems to be rooted in his belief that “everyone can and must innovate.” It’s not a secret that the “innovation is everyone’s responsibility” point of view is very popular, due to its perfectly democratic and egalitarian appeal. And yet, it’s completely wrong. Bradt and other believers in “innovation holacracy” confuse innovation with operational improvement. True, in any organization, everyone from a janitor to a division head can improve his or her performance in such a way that it’ll benefit the whole organization. But innovation is not any improvement; innovation is a strategic process of improving the company’s products, services and business models.

Not everyone can do that because not everyone has skills, experience and access to proprietary corporate information to understand the company’s strategic goals. And not everyone must do that because not everyone has an authority to allocate resources required to implement strategic decisions.

No, I’m not saying that innovation should be restricted to a limited number of corporate executives. Quite to the contrary, what makes a company truly innovative is its ability to harness the “collective wisdom” of all of its employees. And that’s where the role of a Chief Innovation Officer (or whatever fancy label one might stick to this person) becomes crucial. Because things, be it innovation or any other corporate process, don’t happen by themselves; they need to be planned, executed, monitored and repeated. Because anyone who understands how corporations work would tell you that when everyone is in charge, no one is.

Some time ago, I wrote about ways we fake innovation. Incidentally, I mentioned that we’re faking innovation when we appoint a Chief Innovation Officer, but give him or her neither line authority nor fixed budget. I’d like to add here that we’re equally faking innovation when we replace discussing the nuts and bolts of innovation process with a childish game of calling names.

Image credit: “1395 Daisy” by Diana Marshall (http://paintingthedayaway.blogspot.com/2011_01_01_archive.html)

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The Game of Acceleration

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What helps startups succeed? One of a few factors identified so far is providing startups with mentoring. According to the U.S. Small Business Administration–and a 2014 similar study in the U.K.–small businesses receiving mentoring services survive longer than non-mentored enterprises.

This fact points to a potential importance of startup accelerators and incubators. Yet, the real value of startup accelerators, which is a relatively new phenomenon, is far from being properly understood. That’s why one can’t but welcome a recent study on the topic conducted by Ian Hathaway who presented his findings in a Brookings Institution Brief and a Harvard Business Review article.

First of all, Hathaway does a great job by precisely defining the very term “startup accelerator” and then explaining why this type of startup support must not be confused with others, primarily with startup incubators and angel investors. Hathaway also provides useful data on the regional distribution of startup accelerators in the U.S.

However, quite naturally, I was mostly interested to know whether or not startup accelerators accelerate startups. Well, it turns out that some of them do and some of them don’t. Published data show that top accelerator programs do shorten the time for their graduates to reach key milestones, such as gaining customer traction, raising venture capital and exiting by acquisition. However, these positive effects dissipate when looking at a broader sample of accelerators. In fact, many programs do not accelerate startup development, and in some cases may be even harmful.

It appears to me that the data collected by Hathaway call for the creation of a national catalog–the U.S. News & World Report of Best Colleges Rankings immediately comes to mind here–providing all existing startup accelerators with a ranking reflecting their effects on the future trajectory of their graduates. Using such a catalog will help startups make informed decisions when considering joining an accelerator program–exactly as the college ranking helps high-school graduates find a school of their dream. Sure, not every startup will be able to enter an accelerator of their choice. But at the very least, they’ll be prevented from spending time and equity on the programs that can’t really accelerate them.

Image credit: http://www.dailygalaxy.com

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Don’t Fire Me: I’m Innovating

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It is election season here in the United States, and the stump speech–a standard, boring and short on substance pitch delivered by the acting and aspiring (and often uninspiring) politicians–is back in vogue. Recently, I recognized what the stump speech reminds me. It reminds me of our endless talks about establishing a culture of innovation. The same stuff: too many words, too little substance.

What really bothers me is that while calling to “nurture a culture of innovation,” “promote risk-taking and experimentation” and “celebrate failure” (why on earth should we celebrate failure?), we ignore practical measures to support more entrepreneurial corporate spirit.

So I decided to compose a list of specific corporate policies that organizations may try in order to establish the culture of innovation. I must admit that at the moment, the list is depressingly short. It actually includes only two entries.

  1. I propose to make stock option grants, as opposed to cash bonuses and other monetary rewards, the principal incentive for engaging employees in innovation projects.

This proposal is based on a 2015 finding that companies offering stock options to non-executive employees were more innovative, and that the positive effect of stock options on innovation was more pronounced with longer-term grants.

  1. I propose to place employees involved in innovation projects on fixed-term employment contracts, as opposed to employment-at-will. Alternatively, the creation of tenure-like job arrangements for people involved in strategic innovation initiatives can be considered.

This proposal is taking cue from a 2001 study showing that labor laws making it more difficult to fire employees increase their participation in corporate innovation activities. The authors of the study argued that the lower threat of termination produced by stronger anti-dismissal laws decreased the “cost of failure” for employees to engage in potentially risky innovation projects.

As it turns out, labor laws may have surprisingly strong effect on innovation. Another study has recently found that companies in 34 U.S. states having the so-called constituency statues produce more high-quality patents than those in 16 states lacking the statues. A constituency statue encourages corporate directors to consider non-shareholder (e.g., employees) interests when making business decisions, therefore forcing them to think of the long-term interests of their companies rather than the short-term profits.

The both studies strongly suggest that the best way to encourage risk-taking and experimentation is to remove the proverbial Sword of Damocles of punishment for innovation failure, something that any organization can easily do by modifying its termination policies. In other words, providing employees with immunity for failed innovation projects is better than celebrating them.

Image credit: Richard Westall, “The Sword of Damocles” (1812)

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Don’t eliminate email. Charge for it.

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In a recent Harvard Business Review piece, Cal Newport proposes to eliminate email. Newport argues that email creates what he calls an “unstructured workflow” that reduces corporate planning and decision making to overcommunication. Newport further asserts that the unstructured flow of emails negatively impacts productivity by preventing employees from working on important tasks. Worse, by being transformed into message-passing robots, highly-skilled knowledge workers are losing satisfaction with their jobs.

Newport wants to replace emails with a system of office hours, in which employees would post a schedule of 2-3 stretches of time during the day when they will be available for communication (in person, by phone or using a messaging app like Slack). The major benefit of the system, in Newport’s view, is that outside their office hours, workers won’t be wasting time answering endless messages and will instead get on doing meaningful things. Needless to say, no one will be bothered to respond to any message at home or on vacation.

I definitely see useful elements in Newport’s proposal, although I’m afraid that creative employees will rapidly find ways to abuse his system of office hours too. But I disagree with Newport on principle: I don’t think that the best way to prevent an excessive use of a commodity (and that’s what email is: a commodity) is to ban it. What is a better way, for example, to prevent tobacco or alcohol abuse: to completely prohibit them or to tax their consumption? I think we all know the answer to this question.

So I propose that instead of eliminating corporate emails, we start charging for them. In practical terms, every business unit in an organization will be paying for each email sent by its worker from its budget, exactly as it would pay for other expenses, such as travel or buying office supplies. Within units, each worker will be assigned a “quota” appropriate to his or her position and responsibility. Alternatively, email usage of each worker will be monitored for signs of “abuse” (exactly as many companies are tracking expenses for the notorious “business meals”).

Admittedly, charging for emails won’t make their flow “structured,” but it will dramatically reduce their volume–and with all due respect to Newport’s disdain for “unstructured workflow,” it is email volume rather than anything else that troubles people. (Not to mention that charging for emails will essentially stop using them for private purposes, something that many companies are concerned about).

I also suspect that paying for email will help many people “hate” it less. After all, don’t we all value things that we chose to pay for?

Image credit: Gerard Terborch “Woman Writing a Letter” (1655) (http://bjws.blogspot.com/2013/01/1600s-women-reading-writing-letters-no.html)

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Get it right: how to help startups succeed

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Given the increasingly important role startups and other small businesses play in today’s economy, supporting them should be considered a policy that will have a profound positive effect on the global economy. From this perspective, pinpointing factors casing startups fail is crucial. Equally, if not more, valuable would be identifying factors that help startups succeed.

A number of such factors have been already identified, and here, I’d like to mention three. First, it’s diversity of the founding team. For example, according to a recent study, startup teams with at least one female founder performed 63 percent better than all male teams. The beauty of this factor is that it’s perfectly actionable: you can easily diversify your founding team by inviting people of different gender, age and prior life experience.

Second, it’s providing startups with advice. According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, small businesses receiving mentoring services survive longer than non-mentored entrepreneurs, the fact that points to a potential value of startup accelerators and incubators. A similar conclusion has been reached in a 2014 study conducted in the UK.

Third, it’s the source of funding. It was demonstrated that the corporate venture capital funding (c-VC) is particularly beneficial to startups: startups that had gone public after being funded by at least one c-VC investor outperformed those funded exclusively by traditional VCs (t-VC), as measured by average annual revenue growth, increase in ROA and stock price performance. The reason might be rooted in the fact that the vast majority of c-VC actively work with their portfolio startups providing them with domain expertise and access to proprietary networks. One could argue that the industry-specific expertise delivered by experienced corporate teams would be much more valuable to startups that the one drawn from the “generalists” employed by t-VCs.

New data add granularity to this picture. Researchers from the Wharton’s Mack Institute for Innovation Management tracked the performance of biotech startups funded by both types of VC and found that startups funded by c-VC demonstrated higher innovation output (in terms of the number of patents granted and scientific articles published) than those funded by t-VCs.

This is not a trivial finding. One can easily expect that large pharmaceutical companies could help biotech startups increase their operational performance by sharing knowledge in clinical trial design, regulatory requirements and compliance. Instead, c-VC funding helped startups display increased innovation rates, which, as I pointed out in my previous post, is crucially important in R&D-intense sectors, such as biotech.

Additional studies will hopefully follow to investigate how c-VC funding specifically benefit startups in other industries.

Image credit: http://www.vice.com/en_au/read/art-basel-2015-was-a-sopping-wet-mess-but-it-was-still-pretty-good

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Fashion guru Tim Gunn on crowdsourcing

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Tim Gunn is a prominent fashion consultant, TV personality and author. He’s best known as the Emmy Award-winning co-host of the reality show Project Runway; he’s also the author of four bestselling books.

Now, I have to admit that I don’t know what Tim Gunn thinks about crowdsourcing. But just read these lines from his recent book “Tim Gunn: The Natty Professor”:

“Go to a museum! Take every opportunity to discover things you don’t know exist. I encourage rampant googling, too, but when you google, you only find information you search for. When you look around a museum, things find you.”

That’s exactly what crowdsourcing is all about! When you look for a solution to your problem in a traditional way–by reading literature, googling or talking to experts (or “experts”)–you essentially define the borders within which the desired solution can be found. In a sense, you already define this solution in advance.

When you’re crowdsourcing, you don’t have to find solutions. You post your problem on-line, and then solutions find you. Moreover, because of the inherent openness of on-line platforms, these solutions can come from anywhere–even from places “you didn’t know exist”–giving you the diversity of opinions and suggestions you can’t get from any other approach.

Sure, as every tool, crowdsourcing has its application limits. For one, I don’t believe that it will be successful in fashion design; individual creativity shaped by mentoring of bona fide experts like Tim Gunn still matters the most in this business. (Nor do I believe, for that matter, that robots will replace fashion designers any time soon.) But in many other fields of human activity, the ones requiring collective, diverse approaches to complex technical, business or social problems, crowdsourcing is the most effective (and, equally importantly, cost-effective) tool.

Image credit: Tim Gunn signs his book for my wife in Boston (December 2015)

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When it comes to (some) startups, ideas do matter

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The rate of startup failure remains depressingly high: 55% of startups close before raising $1M in funding, and almost 70% of them die having raised less than $5M. So the question “Why do startups fail?”–or succeed, if you prefer a positive spin–is far from being purely academic, given the important role small businesses play in the global economy.

The lack of market demand, insufficient funding and incompetent team are routinely mentioned to account for the death of yet another startup project. One the other hand, factors making startups more successful have begun to emerge too. For example, the U.S. Small Business Administration reports that small businesses receiving mentoring services survive longer than non-mentored entrepreneurs, the fact pointing to potential value of startup accelerators and incubators. It was also noticed that startups that were funded by at least one corporate VC investor outperformed those funded exclusively by traditional VCs (here and here).

And then, there is a perennially debated question of the importance of the original idea behind any startup. One can often hear that ideas “are a dime a dozen” and that “startups are all about execution;” but a recent study paints more nuanced picture. The authors of the study took a look at a unique entrepreneurial program, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Venture Mentoring Service (VMS). A peculiar feature of this program is that when an entrepreneur joins the VMS, a select group of advisors reviews a summary of the proposed venture, a document that describes technology, business model, key customers, etc., but provides little information about the founding team. Based on this summary, which is essentially just a “naked” idea behind the venture, VMS advisors decide whether to work with it.

Having analyzed the eventual outcomes of 652 ventures gone through VMS in 2005-2012, the authors of the study showed a positive correlation between the number of advisors who wanted to mentor a given venture–a signal of the quality of the original idea–and the likelihood that the startup would eventually reach the commercialization phase.

But there was a twist. The correlation between the advisor interest and startup success was especially strong for ventures with documented intellectual capital in R&D-intense sectors, such as life sciences and medical devices. No such a correlation was seen for non-R&D-intense sectors, such as consumer web and enterprise software.

The significance of the study is in pointing out that in different industries, there are different factors defining the ultimate success of newly emerging companies. These factors need to be further identified, industry by industry (a nice example of an “industry-specific” mentorship can be found here), and used as a tool by everyone working with startups: government agencies, accelerators/incubators and individual mentors.

Image credit: http://kaboompics.com/one_foto/1315

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Big Brother Loves You

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By contributing to economic growth and creating jobs, small businesses play an important, perhaps, increasingly important, role in the global economy. Moreover, as the cradle for novel technologies and business models, small companies serve as the engine of the innovation process.

Yet, establishing a small business carries a heavy load of uncertainty: only half of new companies survive through their first five years; the attrition rate for high-tech startups exploring new, riskier technologies is even higher. Every measure that could help small companies succeed will therefore have a profound positive effect on the world’s economy in general.

Obviously, governments should take a lead in supporting small businesses; however, big corporations too can assume some responsibility in looking after their little brothers. Getting access to corporate resources, through establishing “big-small” collaborations, will allow small companies rapidly scale their businesses and acquire new customers, increasing their chances to succeed. This brotherly love doesn’t have to be completely altruistic, though. For large companies, working with nimble, inherently entrepreneurial startups can help rejuvenate and speed up corporate innovation programs.

The collaboration between large and small companies may take different forms, and one in particular, corporate venture capital funds (CVC), is rapidly gaining traction. According to a research firm CB Insight, in 2014, there was a 28% growth over 2013 in corporate VC groups making their first investment in startups; the number of existing CVC funds was expected to double in 2015. In fact, one-fifth of all venture deals in Q3 2015 included CVC participation.

Moreover, from the startups point of view, corporate money has turned out to be a particularly successful investment. As described in-depth in a 2013 Harvard Business Review article, over the period of 1980-2004, startups that had gone public after being funded by at least one corporate VC investor outperformed those funded exclusively by traditional VCs (as measured by average annual revenue growth, increase in ROA and stock price performance).

Why is that? The explanation seems to lie in the objectives that the corporate and traditional VCs pursue when investing in startups. While traditional VCs invest capital with the sole objective of financial returns, CVCs often invest for primarily strategic reasons, with financial return being only a secondary consideration. In fact, in a CB Insight survey, 4 out of 5 CVCs named strategic value of working with startups as a key decision driver. Moreover, the vast majority of CVCs actively work with their portfolio companies providing them with domain expertise and access to their proprietary networks. One could argue that the industry-specific expertise delivered by corporate teams would be much more valuable to startups that the one drawn from the “generalists” employed by traditional VCs.

Image credit: Ralph Earle (1751-1801), “Portrait of Two Brothers”

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