27: Ali Hamed, Managing Partner at CoVenture

“First principles” thinking gets a lot of lip service today in technology and venture capital. While its in vogue to acknowledge this way of thinking, very few actually adhere to it in practice. In this episode, I chatted with Ali Hamed, Managing Partner at CoVenture — one of the most “first principles” thinkers I’ve had the privilege of speaking with and hosting on the show.  In this episode, Ali opened up what is possible when you think creatively — whether its how to structure a firm across multiple asset classes (lending, venture capital and crypto), invest in new digital asset classes (e.g. rolling up Instagram accounts) or evaluate a company’s progress (debunking the fallacy of MRR and growth thresholds necessarily indicating progress). Ali covered it all in this conversation.  It was a pleasure to have Ali on the show. He pushed my thinking through the conversation and I learned a lot from him.