#113: The Competition for Capital with Pip Coburn and Brynne Thompson: Investment Process #1 of 5.

This is part one of a five part series on investment process. We’ll walk through a few tools and concepts that we hope might spark ideas or tweaks or even affirmations for your own investment process, and then we get to sit down with some friends for additional conversation. Thanks for listening.

One of the most energizing moments as an investor seems to be when we discover insightful, sometimes one or two-degree changes that open up those amazing, uncorrelated insights that make the whole decision-making and portfolio management process seem clear. 

With that in mind, we slow down for this conversation to walk through a couple of processes we use to create friction and create a competition for capital, an idea that I think shoots focused energy through an entire investment process, start to finish. The processes include: 

• a layered, qualified funnel, 
• weekly rounds with completion and decision-making at the end of the week, a
• benches and trackers to capture companies that didn’t win in the competition for capital at that time.

These are methods to counter rabbit holes, a low return on time, and to increase team communication and focus. The purpose of presenting this is to, as always, offer up methods that you can then tweak as you like or let them go on their way.

Let’s jump in.