Decisive Investor Digest

#53 Angelinvesting.it - From idea to Series A - Weekly Newsletter

Dear reader,

Imagine, we're in the year 2001, and a super confidential deck about a new, revolutionary mode of transportation lands on your desk. It's gathering seed funding, and among the investors there are legends. Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos from Amazon are in.

Your contact tells you that there's room in the round, but you need to move fast to not miss the opportunity. The Simone Cimminelli of 2001 would have replied without thinking too much: "I am in". With two angels like that behind it, how could one not jump in?!

Fast forward, that decision in a couple of years would have resulted in my entire investment being lost. And I would have deserved it, there's no arguing about that.

Maybe you remember, the investment I'm talking about was in Segway, a hardware startup that wanted to produce a kind of scooter with parallel wheels and a motor in the middle that promised to change mobility, but then it ended up upside down.

There's nothing strange about a startup failing, but this mental experiment well represents one of the worst enemies of an angel investor. The FOMO, short for Fear of Missing Out. A very popular concept in Silicon Valley, where investors need to move quickly and decisively to not miss the next big thing.

Being able to decide with decisiveness and promptness is a great quality, but often, presented as speed, there's instead laziness. There's a lack of desire to allocate the mental buffer necessary to do the analyses that are needed.

Sometimes these energy-saving shortcuts are so mechanical and core in our way of being that we don't even realize we have them. They are the famous biases that have gained so much attention among modern thinkers.

For several years now, I have placed slowness at the center of my way of conceiving work. Productivity is a false idol in which I have squandered far too much time, alas. I regret the time lost in perfecting secondary processes, trying to create routines copied like magic formulas, like silver bullets of success.

Slowing down, in a world that seems to always accelerate, is for me a form of stubborn rebellion. I have become very disciplined in taking notes. I note down practically everything, writing is thinking. The more time I have to write, the more time I have to think. I have a notebook (digital) in which I jot down the small and big decisions I make as I make them.

This exercise leads me to be slower than the world perhaps wants me to be, but to the world, I respond by raising (slowly) the middle finger while quoting Socrates.

Simone

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