Reanimate
What if we could bring it back, but make everyone better off by fixing v1.0?
Aluminum is 95% recycled due to energy content. Lead acid batteries schlep cores around because the alternative fails price, performance and sustainability requirements. If we don't start doing something similar with lithium and cobalt, or commercialize solid state batteries, we may paint ourselves into a corner during the electrification of everything.
Rockets are reusable now, because scaling space logistics is prohibitively expensive without it. Most of micromobility will falter due to the disposable fleets of the market leaders, and the subscale progress of their fast followers and laggards. Global unbalances remain stark, primarily due to waste.
Why doesn't that thinking apply to young companies, especially the small and/or unlucky? Private equity and distressed credit investors do this kind of work with middle market companies, and sometimes large public behemoths go through restructuring - generally, the minimum amount of capital put to work is $10s or $100s of millions. If a company that never reaches escape velocity, it leaves a crater in the ground. What's worse, is the fallout can ruin sectors - even if someone pitched a version of Theranos, Solyndra or Better Place that worked, nobody would fund it. That's waste at a monumental scale, and American industry doesn't have new companies to spare. The main barrier is a curse of diversity, the corporate equivalent of the Anna Karenina Principle: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
We've (re)engineered a lot of companies. Known ugly dynamics can be fixed, if we're honest about them. Rebooting a stale approach will just make the holes in the ground bigger.
To do it differently, we take a controlling interest in v2.0 through add(venture) capital while maintaining:
(a) key team members
(b) as much momentum as possible
(c) the option to enter our accelerate phase
Why is the baby ugly, and how would we fix it within ~1 year?
Aluminum is 95% recycled due to energy content. Lead acid batteries schlep cores around because the alternative fails price, performance and sustainability requirements. If we don't start doing something similar with lithium and cobalt, or commercialize solid state batteries, we may paint ourselves into a corner during the electrification of everything.
Rockets are reusable now, because scaling space logistics is prohibitively expensive without it. Most of micromobility will falter due to the disposable fleets of the market leaders, and the subscale progress of their fast followers and laggards. Global unbalances remain stark, primarily due to waste.
Why doesn't that thinking apply to young companies, especially the small and/or unlucky? Private equity and distressed credit investors do this kind of work with middle market companies, and sometimes large public behemoths go through restructuring - generally, the minimum amount of capital put to work is $10s or $100s of millions. If a company that never reaches escape velocity, it leaves a crater in the ground. What's worse, is the fallout can ruin sectors - even if someone pitched a version of Theranos, Solyndra or Better Place that worked, nobody would fund it. That's waste at a monumental scale, and American industry doesn't have new companies to spare. The main barrier is a curse of diversity, the corporate equivalent of the Anna Karenina Principle: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
We've (re)engineered a lot of companies. Known ugly dynamics can be fixed, if we're honest about them. Rebooting a stale approach will just make the holes in the ground bigger.
To do it differently, we take a controlling interest in v2.0 through add(venture) capital while maintaining:
(a) key team members
(b) as much momentum as possible
(c) the option to enter our accelerate phase
Why is the baby ugly, and how would we fix it within ~1 year?
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