The Anti-Portfolio Problem: What Your Fund’s Passes Say About Its Judgment Every fund has an anti-portfolio – the deals it passed on that later became huge wins for someone else. Bessemer famously publishes theirs. Most funds never study their own, because reviewing a pass takes deliberate effort and reviewing a win doesn’t. That’s backwards: passes are the highest-signal dataset a
The Deal Champion’s Blind Spot: Why the Person Who Loves a Deal Can’t Be the One Who Clears It The partner who sourced a deal and wrote the memo has already invested identity and reputation in it before the IC meeting starts – which makes them structurally unable to grade it neutrally, no matter how disciplined they are. Formally assigning
I asked Claude to help me build a pitch deck. Here’s what actually happened. We had a meeting with a potential client. 400+ person company. Fortune-level clients. Three established practices. I did the prep. I used Claude. The deck was solid. And then the client redirected us, mid-meeting. Not because the deck was bad. Because they were further along
Will AI Take My Job? I have 4 years of experience in IT services analysis. Last month I asked #Claude directly: will you take my job? It said no. Gave me a thoughtful answer about human judgment, relationship intelligence and contextual reasoning. Very reassuring. Very well structured. Then I asked it to analyze Wipro’s last quarterly filing. It took 3
Before we start working with a services founder, there are a few questions I always ask. Not a formal framework, just things I’ve learned to check over a few hundred conversations. They’re not trick questions. Most founders have thought about at least some of them. But the pattern I keep seeing is this: the founders who’ve actually broken past $10M
One Anthropic employee generates the same revenue as 180 Tata Consultancy Services employees. Yes, you read that right. We were looking at revenue-per-employee numbers across a few “tech companies” this week for a client that wanted to benchmark itself against the best in the industry. When we extended that to the top AI companies – the spread is just crazy.
The Stupid Work: Where VC Analyst Time Actually Goes Across multiple calls with Venture Capital and Private Equity fund teams, the consistent finding is that writing the IC memo is not where analyst time goes – an estimated 30-40% of investment team hours disappear into logging, chasing, and reformatting instead. Buying another CRM doesn’t fix this, because CRMs log relationships,
We Paste Everything Into Claude: The Data Security Problem in VC Diligence Nobody Talks About Analysts at VC and PE funds routinely paste confidential term sheets, cap tables, and financial models into personal ChatGPT or Claude accounts, because it works and nobody told them not to. The risk isn’t that these AI tools are unsafe – most enterprise tiers are
The world’s most known consulting firm just stopped selling consulting. Three days ago, McKinsey announced a partnership with AppliedAI to deliver agentic AI workflows in regulated industries. Not a new practice. Not more consultants. A platform, Opus, that turns McKinsey’s transformation method into a repeatable, governed execution engine. Their own research sets the context: 64% of organisations are experimenting with
Anthropic just filed for a $1 trillion IPO. It has 300,000 enterprise clients. Most of them also have an IT services contract with TCS, Infosys or Wipro. Something has to give. I was talking to a consulting leader last month who told me their biggest competitor isn’t another IT firm anymore. It’s the fact that their client’s product team had
Your Client Just Got a New Team Member. It Works 24/7 and Doesn’t Invoice. Last week, Google announced Gemini Spark. It’s a 24/7 AI agent that runs on Google Cloud even when your laptop is off. It connects to Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Calendar. It monitors inboxes, synthesizes meeting notes, drafts emails, completes multi-step tasks. Autonomously. Continuously. Sundar Pichai called it:
Services revenue leaks. Project ends. Client pauses. Budget gets cut. Stakeholder changes. You’re back to hunting the next SOW. You’re not building a business. You’re bailing with a bucket. Here’s what that looks like at scale: Every April, you start at zero. Again. Every quarter, pipeline anxiety. Again. Every year, growth means more people, more proposals, more delivery risk. Again.
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