Pinto Ventures Angel Talk

Investing in VonZu Tech - a memo to myself Globalisation and Retail Have you ever noticed that in the list of the richest people in every country there is always at least one Retail family? This is true in the US (e.g Walton family), Germany (e.g. Albrecht family), in smaller countries like Portugal (Soares dos Santos family) and is the same even in China (Ma family, Colin Huang).  There is a reason for this: retail goods and food is one of the highest spend categories of households in any country. The last massive transformation that made the money of many of this families was an invention from the 1960s: the sea container.  The evolution of retail via mega chains and stores with their professional category managers and international sourcing teams was made possible by this pice of logistics infrastructure. And this was very much what led to the massive expansion of global trade from 1960 to 2019. My hands-on experience with global trade was first gained as CEO of Spiriant Gm...

This post first appeared in Medium, January 25, 2020 To those that dangle between the corporate and the startup world, the works of Professor Christensen are a  must read . They are useful both for startup teams in a mission to disrupt incumbents and for Boards and Executive Teams of incumbents considering how to react to innovators. I have used his models with many of the companies I worked with. For example when showing how innovators can disrupt the billion dollar industry of freight forwarders and how big incumbent freight forwarders should plan their moves to „disrupt the disrupter“. Add caption But the biggest lesson of Professor Christensen to me was actually a very different one In June 2010 he announced that he had been diagnosed with follicular lymphoma. In July 2010, he had an ischemic stroke. This is enough for any human being to consider getting his „affairs in order“ and leave the stage to dedicate his time to the ones he loves. But on a sunny and cold October 2010 da...

Marc Andreessen of a16z, the Silicon Valley VC has recently published a fantastic post entitled " It's time to build ". He looks at how society has failed to see the Covid-19 crisis coming and how we as society are dealing with it. He claims "part of the problem is clearly foresight, a failure of imagination. But the other part of the problem is what we didn’t *do* in advance. [...] Our nation and our civilisation were built on production, on building. [...] There is only one way to honour their [our forefathers] legacy and to create the future we want for our own children and grandchildren, and that’s to build". Marc calls society to focus on building and less on rent-seeking of the accomplishments of our forefathers. The future is not built by societal-osmosis. The future of our societies is the sum of present actions taken by individuals and their teams over time. The success in building the future is the sum of the actions of special individuals. Thos...