Fiction

1. Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer

I’m told that upon hearing my name he referred to me as ‘the complete man — as unimpressive as he is unimpressed.’

2. Philip Roth, Zuckerman Unbound

3. Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

4. Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark

5. Nabokov, The Enchanter

6. Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor

One can be a lover of Space and its possibilities: take, for example, speed, the smoothness and sword-swish of speed; the aqualine glory of ruling velocity; the joy cry of the curve; and one an be an amateur of Time, an epicure of duration. I delight sensually in Time, in its stuff and spread, in the fall of its folds, in the very impalpability of its grayish gauze, in the coolness of its continuum.

7. W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale

8. W. Somerset Maugham, The Narrow Corner

9. W. Somerset Maugham, Theatre

10. W. Somerset Maugham, Up at the Villa

11. Hermann Hesse, The Journey to the East

12. Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

13. Henry James, Washington Square

14. Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler’s Planet

And partly he was right, for humankind kept doing the same stunts over and over. The old comical tearful stuff. Emotional relationships. Desires incapable of useful fulfillment. Over and over, trying to vent and empty the breast of certain cries, of certain fervencies.

15. Goethe, Faust

16. J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

17. Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

18. Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim

As a kind of token, he made his Sex Life in Ancient Roman face.

19. Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

20. Natalia Ginzburg, The Little Virtues

21. Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

22. Milan Kundera, Life is Elsewhere

For the body is ephemeral and thought is eternal and the flicker of fire is the image of thought.

23. John Boyne, The Heart’s Invisible Furies

24. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

25. Mina Loy, Insel

26. Dostoyevsky, A Faint Heart

27. Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company

It seemed to me as we drove down Santa Monica with the liquor-store lights all halos of color that Shawn was enhanced in such a blurry, silver fox of a night.

28. Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

29. Anthony Marra, The Tsar of Love and Techno

30. Sally Rooney, Normal People

31. Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

32. Albert Camus, The Stranger

33. Rachel Cusk, Outline

34. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

35. Mary Oliver, Felicity

36. William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience

On aesthetics

37. Junichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows

But in the still dimmer light of the candlestand, as I gazed at the trays and bowls standing in the shadows cast by that flickering point of flame, I discovered in the gloss of this lacquerware a depth and richness like that of a still, dark pond, a beauty I had not before seen.

38. Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness

Touring the cathedrals today with cameras and guidebooks in hand, we may experience something at odds with our practical secularism: a peculiar desire to fall to our knees and worship a being as mighty and sublime as we ourselves are small and inadequate.

39. Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture

Metaphysically and theologically, the notion of acedia means that a man does not, in the last resort, give the consent of his will to his own being; that beneath the dynamic activity of his existence, he is still not at one with himself; that, as the Middle Ages expressed it, sadness overwhelms him when he is confronted with the divine goodness immanent in himself (that sadness which is the tristitia saeculi of Holy Scripture).

40. Tolstoy, What is Art?

However poetic, realistic, effectful or diverting an object is, it is not an object of art unless it calls up in a man that feeling, utterly distinct from all other feelings, of joy, of spiritual union with another (the author) and with others (listeners or spectators) who perceive the same artistic work.

The stronger the infection, the better the art is as art, regardless of its content that is, independently of the worth of the feelings it conveys.

41. Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life

Thus in M.G.’s execution two things stand out: the first is the absorbed intenseness of a resurrecting and evocative memory, a memory that says to every object: ‘Lazarus, arise’; the second is a fire, an intoxication of pencil or brush, almost amounting to frenzy.

The limbs of a martyr being flayed alive, or the body of a nymph in a swoon, provided they are skillfully drawn, offer a species of pleasure in which the nature of the subject counts for nothing; if it were otherwise for you, you would oblige me to write you down as a torturer or an amorist.

42. Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner.

On reading

43. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind

44. Alberto Manguel, Into the Looking-Glass Wood

45. Leo Damrosch, Eternity’s Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake

46. Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence

47. Lee Gutkind, You Can’t Make This Stuff Up

48. James Wood, How Fiction Works

George Eliot, in her essay on German realism, put it like this: “The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies… Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.”

On Buddhism

49. The Lankavatara Sutra. Translation and Commentary by Red Pine

50. The Heart Sutra, Red Pine

51. The Diamond Sutra, Red Pine

52. The Platform Sutra: The Zen Teaching of Hui-neng, Red Pine

53. Charles Prebish, Introducing Buddhism

54. Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, Wonders of the Natural Mind

55. Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep

56. Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, Spontaneous Creativity

57. Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, Penetrating Wisdom: The Aspiration of Samantabhadra

58. Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, Wide Awakening: The Heart of Mahamudra and Dzogchen

59. Thich Nhat Hanh, The Diamond That Cuts Through Illusion: Commentaries on the Prajnaparamita Diamond Sutra

On meditation

60. Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go, There You Are

61. Culadasa (John Yates), The Mind Illuminated

62. Ajahn Brahm, Mindfulness, Bliss, and Beyond: A Meditator’s Handbook

Other non-fiction

63. Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy

64. Carl Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul

65. Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols

66. Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

67. Carl Jung, Dreams: Extracts from Collected Works Vols 4, 8, 12, 16

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. They will practice Indian yoga and all its exercises, observe a strict regimen of diet, learn theosophy by heart, or mechanically repeat mystic texts from the literature of the whole world — all because they cannot get on with themselves and have not the slightest faith that anything useful could ever come out of their own souls.

The secret is that only that which can destroy itself is truly alive.

68. Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising

69. Bhagavad Gita. Translated by Eknath Easwaran

70. Osho, When the Shoe Fits: Stories of the Taoist Mystic Chuang Tzu

71. Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics

72. Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism

73. Lori Gottlieb: Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed

74. Susie Orbach, In Therapy

75. Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept

76. Irvin D. Yalom, Love’s Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy

77. Irvin D. Yalom, The Gift of Therapy: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients

78. Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

79. Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live By

There is a curious, extremely interesting term in Japanese that refers to a very special manner of polite, aristocratic speech known as “play language,” asobase kotoba, whereby, instead of saying to a person, for example, “I see that you have come to Tokyo,” one would express the observation by saying, “I see that you are playing at being in Tokyo” — the idea being that the person addressed is in such control of his life and his powers that for him everything is a play, a game. He is able to enter into life as one would enter into a game, freely and with ease.

80. Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain

Walking thus, hour after hour, the senses keyed, one walks the flesh transparent.

81. Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees

82. Renata Adler, Speedboat

83. Thoreau, Walden

84. Walter Isaacson, Leonardo da Vinci

It was not just our way of perceiving objects that made their borders look blurred. He realized that nature itself, independent of how our eyes perceive it, does not have precise lines.

85. Wade Davis, The Wayfinders

86. Howard Sasportas, The Twelve Houses

87. John Doerr, Measure What Matters

88. Robert Waggoner, Lucid Dreaming

89. Dylan Tuccillo, A Field Guide to Lucid Dreaming

90. Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

91. Steven Pressfield, Turning Pro

92. Neville Goddard, Feeling is the Secret

93. Neville Goddard, The Power of Awareness

94. Damien Echols, High Magick

95. Ali Wong, Dear Girls

96. Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince

97. Tao Lin, Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change

98. Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard

To glimpse one’s own true nature is a kind of homegoing, to a place East of the Sun, West of the Moon — the going that needs no home, like that waterfall on the upper Suli Gad that turns to mist before touching the earth and rises once again into the sky.

99. BKS Iyengar, Light on Life

100. Richard Freeman, Art of Vinyasa

101. Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

102. Leigh Brasington, Right Concentration: A Practical Guide to the Jhanas

“We were having a drink at The Den in Beijing,” Fritz Demopoulos recalls. The year was 1999, and The Den was the spot for power brokers to hobnob back then. “Rupert Murdoch has told us that News Corp, one of the biggest media corporates in the world, makes a lot of money from sports. We thought, ‘Wait a minute, if traditional media makes a lot of money from sports, why can’t we bring sports online?’”

Shawei (“brave shark” in Mandarin Chinese) was soon launched. In the span of a year, it became China’s largest sports internet company and sold to Tom.com in a US$20 million deal. Yet Shawei’s success was dwarfed by Fritz’s next venture: Fritz and his co-founders went on to found Qunar, China’s first and largest travel portal valued at US$4.4 billion.

Where did Fritz’s billion-dollar ideas come from? The spark of innovation “sometimes seems as if it comes out of the ether,” Fritz observes. “Does it come from the unconscious? No. I believe there’s a rigorous and systematic way to come up with entrepreneurial ideas.” At Chinaccelerator’s annual 8x8 event, the serial entrepreneur lays out four methods of idea creation and positioning for founders. Let’s dissect them.

1. Visionary founders

Among founders who have passed into legends, Jack Ma, as Fritz puts it, has a “messianic vision to help businesses do businesses better” — whether with Alibaba’s enterprise marketplace, consumer business, or payment cloud. For “super-app” Grab, the vision wasn’t to get people from A to B with ride-hailing, but to “drive Southeast Asia forward.”

“The thing about visionaries is that they see things other people don’t see clearly and they hear things that other people don’t. There’s a fine line between being a visionary and seeing something people don’t see and being considered nuts,” — Marc Porat, CEO and cofounder at General Magic, the “most important dead company in Silicon Valley.”

Now, is your co-founder visionary or delusional? The truth is that you can never tell until the vision is realized. True visionaries almost always have a touch of fanaticism verging on the dysfunctional. Steve Jobs comes to mind: a fanatic with a steadfast, absolute reverence for the vision. Jobs learned from General Magic and eventually realized its vision more than a decade later, in the form of the iPhone.

2. The “can’t-miss genius”

These ideas abound in Silicon Valley or university labs: specialty AI, a superior understanding of certain niche areas such as human-computer interaction or machine vision. “This I describe as a pedigree-driven approach: a solution looking for a problem. It may be a slower approach, and we don’t see it too often, but we do see it,” Fritz observes.

3. The problem-solver approach

As the founder of Queen’s Road Capital, Fritz has been investing in technology companies for a decade. Citing Eric Ries’ classic text Lean Startup, he encourages founders to get up close and personal with customers. Here’s an example of a New York-based company looking to change the personal assistant industry.

What’s amazing about these founders is that they have interviewed 100 personal executive assistants. They video-taped these conversations, they documented them, they prioritized, they created meta tags to figure out the exact pain points and then create amazing products and services around that.

“As an investor, I love that approach,” he says. An intimate understanding of people with real pain points can lead to companies that disrupt several industries at once, creating whole new segments. Think Airbnb and the sharing economy. While the number one reason startups fail is still lack of market need, getting the problem right might sound easier than it is.

4. The “show-me-the money” approach

Also dignified by Fritz as “the businessman approach”, this was how he and his team co-founded three companies over the years.

Just as Shawei.com was born over drinks at The Den, Fritz’s next venture was made in the lobby of the China World Hotel. Having found out that half of magazine advertising spending went to women’s magazines, the team created a digital women’s magazine to catch this wave. Gaogenxie (“high heels” in Mandarin) came about and successfully merged with another company not long after.

Bitten with the startup bug, the team thought that they had it in them for one more. “We keep downgrading ourselves: now we met at a Starbucks at the Hong Kong Airport Express. We thought that the three of us had to make another business,” Fritz remembers. One of the co-founders said, “Google was this huge company. Why don’t we figure out where Google makes most of its money and carve out a piece for ourselves?”

“Google’s biggest areas were travel, financial services, automotive, and medical care. Those were the four biggest verticals in 2004–2005. I said let’s pick one and build a better mousetrap,” says Fritz.

Qunar (“where are you going?” in Mandarin) was launched in 2005 as China’s first travel search engine. The rest is history. The company was listed on the NASDAQ and later acquired by Ctrip in 2015. Years after Jerry Maguire, “Show me the money!” still makes bank.

Honorable mention: the imitation approach

Confucius once said, “By three methods we may learn wisdom: first, by reflection, which is the noblest; second, by imitation, which is the easiest; and third, by experience, which is the bitterest.”

In entrepreneurship as in life, as Fritz puts it, “you can think about things, you can learn from your mistakes, or you can copy others.” Analytically minded entrepreneurs can go to the website of top venture capital firms, research the top 50 companies they invest in in the last 12–24 months, and find the patterns. “Look what ‘smart money’ is doing. Or write to William Bao Bean,” he quips.

A few final thoughts from Fritz

• Remember to not take yourself too seriously. It’s true that capabilities drive passion, but so does serendipity. Sometimes we have to fly blind and hope to land the plane without crashing it.
• Don’t get stuck on any one way. Deng Xiaoping famously said that it doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice.
• Success or failure is only a partial reflection of who you are. Enjoy the entirety of your entrepreneurial adventure: it would not be an adventure without it all.

How Fritz Demopoulos found his multi-billion-dollar ideas was originally published in SOSV on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Batch 17’s schedule was planned down to the minute in December, before Shanghai became a hotbed for the coronavirus. As the outbreak spills from China to the rest of the world, massacring aspiring unicorns, startup programs like Chinaccelerator also struggled to adapt to the new reality.

“In Chinese, the word weiji means crisis. It’s made up of two characters: wei, which means danger, and ji, opportunity. In danger, there are always opportunities,” Ramos tells his team over Zoom.

A tale of two venture worlds

For an American investor, opening shop in China seems to be an act of operational masochism. When Y Combinator bowed out of China after nine months without a demo day or much explanation, the renowned accelerator’s failure to dig its root into Chinese soil is rather more expected than surprising.

Chinaccelerator, operated by the US venture capital firm SOSV, has been striding both realms of China and Everywhere Else since 2010. Hunkering down in Shanghai, it’s among the few US-operated programs with a ringside seat to the most exciting, most cut-throat tech arena. Inside the Great Fire Wall, Chinaccelerator has housed and accelerated once-scrappy startups from around the world including the crypto exchange platform BitMEX, Asia’s first unicorn to have gone through an accelerator or incubator program. For three months during the program, founders from Europe, the Americas, and the rest of Asia move here to absorb China’s breakneck speed of iteration, its obsession with customers, and the art of guanxi for sales & partnership.

guanxi (n): a Chinese social concept based on the exchange of favours, in which personal relationships are considered more important than laws and written agreements. Word origin: “relationships” in Chinese.

— Collins English Dictionary

The venture capital firm SOSV has been investing in China’s unfair advantages for years. Cyril Ebersweiler, SOSV’s ‘visionary punk’ who founded Chinaccelerator, later went on to found HAX, the world’s largest hardware accelerator, in Shenzhen—home to DJI, Tencent, Huawei and other hardware tech giants. While other firms put the brakes on its operations, SOSV has even ramped it up big time. Among the top 20 VCs with more than US$500M AUM, SOSV is among the only five with increased investment activities.

Sean O’Sullivan tells Jason Calacanis about funding companies that are enabling inexpensive testing for COVID-19, growing blood in bioreactors, developing cell-based meats, breathing the Promethean fire into hardware, and generally making our planet a more humane, better place (YouTube). No time to stop now.

Cockroach-ing through COVID

Batch 17 kickstarted, on schedule, at the beginning of February. On that first night, 32 founders spread across eight time zones dialed in from Barcelona, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Zurich, Amsterdam, Moscow, New Delhi, Shanghai, Taipei, Bangalore, and Melbourne. William Bao Bean, a general partner at SOSV, welcomed the new cohort from his hotel, drink in hand.

Bao Bean’s favorite way of describing his founders is cockroach entrepreneurs: faced with disasters, cockroaches “may lose a leg or two, but they’ll survive.” Long after the pandemic, they’d still be thriving.

Cockroach entrepreneurs (n): founding teams with ruthless efficiency and operational athleticism, making use of whatever resources on hand to survive, turning enterprise garbage and feces into food.

— Chinaccelerator Disaster Preparedness Playbook

“It’s a shitstorm out there, but cockroaches eat shit and turn it into life. Welcome to the fellowship,” says Bao Bean.

Principles as your north star

Ramos’ number one principle, which cascades to the staff, is that “with principles comes freedom.” In high noise-to-signal environments, guiding principles will serve as your north star. Against the hazardous flux of uncertainty, principles will become the backbone of the organization, vertebra by vertebra.

As VC-cum-accelerator, Chinaccelerator counts on these following principles:

• Stand on the shoulders of giants. Extract and document first-hand tacit knowledge from battle-hardened mentors.
• Internal over external audience. Community first: build strong, mutually reinforcing internal relationships so that each founder can benefit from peer-pressure, alumni support, expectation and motivation from others.
• Operational over optical. Get down and dirty with startups instead of posing for the optics.
• Profitability over valuation. Strive for positive unit economics.
• People over products. Invest in people and our human capital.

With those principles fought over and agreed upon, Ramos starts to program the curriculum. First, there’s the calendar problem. If he stretched the definition of working hours from 9–5 to 6-midnight, the founders would share one hour of functional awakeness per day. Second, the startups are so diverse that a fixed curriculum, together with its one-size-fits-all approach, seems to do more harm than good.

Ramos puts the last batch’s schedule to the shredder and goes back to the whiteboard. No, Batch 17 won’t be a broadcast version of the residential program, but a new kind of accelerator, making virtual of necessity.

Acceleration in the Virtual Valley: less friction, greater force

Here the ji in weiji comes in: instead of having entrepreneurs-in-residence and mentors come to Shanghai, Chinaccelerator will bring The Virtual Valley to the startups, an experiment involving its hundreds of mentors and an army of VC investment associates.

Building two parallel curricula to accommodate the timezones, Ramos — a biomedical engineering PhD dropout and executor extraordinaire — takes to the tasks of layering the virtual sessions. Founders can attend either or both curricula, sleep be damned. Apart from the training sessions by high-profile founders, Batch 17 also includes dozens of hands-on workshops by builders at Grab, Rotten Tomatoes, TikTok, Ctrip, WeChat, to name a few.

While the program is modular and tailored, once a week, everyone convenes for an informal jam session to reflect on their progress. Here are the tried-and-true lessons that the Chinaccelerator team has learned:

Over-communicate. It pays to repeat yourself, especially when people are not in the same room. LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner is a big fan of repetition: “If you want to get your point across, especially to a broader audience, you need to repeat yourself so often, you get sick of hearing yourself say it. And only then will people begin to internalize what you’re saying.” Reinforce your messages in different ways so that people are on the same page.

Fuckup Friday: A highlight of the program is the weekly jam session, during which Batch 17 founders share their fuckups-of-the-week (the record is currently at 25) and commiserate. Many lessons learned, and many laughs earned.

Founder Story: This is the occasion when a founder tells the group an exhaustive account of their life story, starting with an obligatory baby picture. Many stories touch on major life-changing milestones as well as hopes and dreams, fears and demons. In knowing someone intimately, we are ultimately reminded that one is not just their startup, and beyond the screen there’s a magnanimous, “multivariate human being,” as SOSV Managing General Partner Sean O’Sullivan puts it. Watch O’Sullivan’s founder story here.

Know a great entrepreneur making the impossible inevitable?

Refer them our way. sosv.com

Inside Chinaccelerator: the eight-timezone virtual accelerator hunkering down in Shanghai was originally published in SOSV on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Beyond providing capital, VCs count on platform functions to raise funds and influence founders. These functions encompass the entirety of the startup lifecycle — ranging from PR, recruiting, design, legal services to mental health counseling.

As Mark Suster, Managing Partner of Upfront Ventures and straight talker extraordinaire behind the popular VC blog Both Sides of the Table, puts it:

Our top requests include: helping with PR announcements, helping with recruiting, helping to connect with other companies with similar issues (acquiring expertise), helping with introductions (biz dev) and of course help with strategy, advice, mentorship, conflict resolution and several other interactions.

At SOSV, deemed “The Accelerator VC”, these also include multi-million dollar wet labs, scientists-in-residence, hardware equipment, and free product cross-promotion for their vertically focused accelerators. For venture firms without a designated platform platoon, here are the most high-leverage VC platform functions that you can invest in.

1. Increase reputation capital with public relations

“The running joke of the firm is that we’re a media company that monetizes through venture capital,” Marc Andreessen once says. If we have anyone to thank for the image of financiers as celebrities, that person would be a16z’s infamous Margit Wennmachers, the doyenne of PR for venture capital.

Wennmachers co-founded OutCast Communications — representing Amazon, Facebook, Etsy and other tech giants — before helping launch Andreessen Horowitz. At a16z, she advanced the fund’s mission by shaping the narratives about the general partners and its portfolio companies.

“In the years that followed, many firms emulated Andreessen Horowitz’s strategy, hiring marketing and communications leads,” wrote WIRED Magazine’s Jessi Hempel in a profile of Wennmachers. Hempel continues: “As a journalist, I’d often get the call: ‘Hey, we’re trying to hire a Margit. Do you know anyone?’”

On the other end of the spectrum, PR can include an entire in-house content team that establishes the firm as an authority without ever mentioning the partners. At First Round Capital, ex-VentureBeat journalist Camille Ricketts pioneered the First Round Review to deliver unique, contrarian voices and actionable insights to entrepreneurs. The wide spectrum of VC podcasts, newsletters and state-of-startups surveys has created both promotional and educational values, reducing information asymmetry while helping founders find synergy.

2. Invest in human capital

“Fundamentally venture capital is about human capital,” shares Suster.

Human capital, in the context of early-stage startups, is a matter of survival. Co-founder disputes, or great people hired at the wrong time for the wrong roles, have taken their toll on team morale and company growth.

Here are some of the ways that VCs invest in human capital: recruiting C-suite talent, hiring managers, dissolving conflicts, and even running intern programs. William Bao Bean, a general partner at SOSV and formerly of SingTel Innov8 and SoftBank China & India, often mobilizes his network of operators across Asia to support early-stage startups. The result is investor-founder relationships that last several reincarnations of a startup. Founders of companies that exited keep coming back to the SOSV ecosystem to benefit from the network and, in turn, contribute to it.

In a study of 160 VCs by Columbia Business School, “a substantial proportion of VCs affirm that they adopt the strategy of recycling managers in their portfolio companies.” The study finds that VCs with “superior network resources (including management recruiting contacts) are more likely to succeed when bidding for portfolio companies.” Firms such as Accel and Lerer Hippeau have all created their own job boards, acting as a hub for portfolio companies and for job-seeking tech talents.

3. Take care of founder mental health

Founding a company is an excruciatingly lonely job: Elon Musk infamously quipped that “Starting a company is like eating glass and staring into the abyss.”

Over time, investors with more “skin in the game” gradually take on the role of sounding board, sparring partner, mediator, and sometimes amateur therapist.

It is not uncommon that founders wrestling with existential questions call their investors first instead of their spouse. (The average investor-founder relationship is about 10 years, longer than the average marriage in the US.)

Alan Clayton — the creator of the “Wholebrain Startup” methodology and SOSV’s internal coach — makes sure each portfolio team understands the co-founders' “user manual”: how each team member thinks and functions, and how to fully liberate the intellectual resources of startup founders and teams.

“Life expectancy of Fortune 500 companies has fallen from 50 years to around 10 years in just a decade, and the world is hungry and bankrupt. The SOSV rescue package involves combining science and psychology, and in particular the work of Ned Herrmann at GE, NLP gurus Robert Dilts & Todd Epstein,” writes Clayton.

Meanwhile, Crunchbase News reports of “a small, but growing, cohort of venture capital firms that explicitly offer mental health services for their portfolios,” including Starting Line, Crosscut, Felicis and Alpha Bridge. According to a study by Michael Freeman MD at UC San Francisco, entrepreneurs are 2X more likely to suffer from depression and 3X more likely to suffer from substance abuse. It’s high time that the productivity-obsessed tech world had an honest look at founder mental health. Investors who invest in human capital will help set up their companies for long-term success.

How to win funds and influence founders

As Jay Acunzo, VP Platform at NextView Ventures, puts it: every VC firm “runs a bakery on a street full of bakeries that all sell one thing: plain bagels.”

Acunzo’s title, though unfamiliar to laymen, has become more common as the competition between VC firms increases. VC Platform, a community of platform professionals at VC firms, has grown from a handful in New York City to now over 320 members across the world.

Platform professionals help VCs invest in two types of assets: reputation capital and human capital.

The result is a flywheel effect that ripples throughout the portfolio and into the outer startup ecosystem: better communication leads to better deal flow and attracts better talents for portfolio companies, which in turn increases the firm’s reputation. As the investors’ war heats up, platform functions are also shifting into full gear.

VC platform: the shadow task force behind investors’ war for founders was originally published in SOSV on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.