Playing the long game—eschewing short-term gratification in order to work toward an uncertain but worthy future goal—isn’t easy. But it’s the surest path to meaningful and lasting success in a world that so often prioritizes what’s easy, quick, and ultimately shallow.

<ul><li>Say no to short-term work that displaces more important things.</li><li>Instead of a to-do list, use a daily calendar to organise your work.</li><li>Use the "Hell yeah" test to figure out if something is worth doing. Say no to anything less than "Wow, that would be amazing!"</li></ul>

How to create the space to explore long-term goals
 

The following questions can help to assess requests and opportunities:<ul><li>What is the actual time commitment?</li><li>What is the opportunity cost?</li><li>What’s the physical and emotional cost?</li><li>Would I regret it in a year if I didn’t do this?</li></ul>

How to evaluate requests and opportunities

<ul><li>Use the 20% time approach. Spend 20% of your time exploring new interests.</li><li>Use the infinite horizon networking. It is a “pure, no-agenda relationship building” that is simply out of personal interest in individuals. The idea is that you never know what could come of it.</li><li>There are four cycles in your career: Learning, creating, connecting, reaping the benefits. These cycles repeat themselves to build your strengths in several areas.</li><li>Use the “no asks for a year” strategy. When meeting someone, first establish a foundation.</li></ul>

Identify the right goals

<ul><li>Use strategic patience: Admit that you need work and time to progress. It often takes two to three years to gain notice in a field you’re pursuing.</li><li>When things don’t improve, ask yourself why you’re doing the thing you’re struggling with, and how it has worked for others.</li><li>Give yourself repeated opportunities to succeed.</li><li>Test concepts in a small way before pursuing them in a bigger way.</li><li>Use deadlines to ensure you stay on track.</li></ul>

Persevering when progress is slow

Consider these questions to help you find strategic direction:<ul><li>What should I spend my time doing?</li><li>What are the 20% of activities that will return 80% of the results?</li><li>What can I stop doing?</li><li>How can I use limitations to my advantage?</li><li>What do I believe about the future, and how do they inform my current actions?</li></ul>

Finding strategic direction

Your personal goals need a long-term strategy. It's no secret that we're pushed to the limit. Today's professionals feel rushed, overwhelmed, and perennially behind. So we keep our heads down, focused on the next thing, and the next, without a moment to breathe. How can we break out of this endless cycle and create the kind of interesting, meaningful lives we all seek? Just as CEOs who optimize for quarterly profits often fail to make the strategic investments necessary for long-term growth, the same is true in our own personal and professional lives. We need to reorient ourselves to see the big picture so we can tap into the power of small changes that, made today, will have an enormous and disproportionate impact on our future success. We need to start playing The Long Game. As top business thinker and Duke University professor Dorie Clark explains, we all know intellectually that lasting success takes persistence and effort. And yet so much of the relentless pressure in our culture pushes us toward doing what's easy, what's guaranteed, or what looks glamorous in the moment. In The Long Game, she argues for a different path. It's about doing small things over time to achieve our goals—and being willing to keep at them, even when they seem pointless, boring, or hard. In The Long Game, Clark shares unique principles and frameworks you can apply to your specific situation, as well as vivid stories from her own career and other professionals' experiences. Everyone is allotted the same twenty-four hours—but with the right strategies, you can leverage those hours in more efficient and powerful ways than you ever imagined. It's never an overnight process, but the long-term payoff is immense: to finally break out of the frenetic day-to-day routine and transform your life and your career.

Stashed ideas

The Long Game

Elizabeth Gilbert teaches how to be creative despite fears and uncertainty and where innovative ideas actually come from.An absolute must-read for anyone who is holding themselves back from pursuing her dreams and hesitating to take the next big leap in life.“Creative entitlement simply means believing that you are allowed to be here, and that — merely by being here — you are allowed to have a voice and a vision of your own.”

Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert

The book is not only packed with inspiration that will empower you to go out and live your best life, but it also includes actionable tasks and ideas on how to find your passion, or element, as Robinson calls it.The ideal read for anyone who is still on the path of finding his passion and calling in life.<blockquote>“If you’re doing something that you love, by the end of the day you may be physically tired but spiritually energized.”</blockquote>

Finding Your Element by Ken Robinson

This is a fantastic piece that will convince you to speed up your decision-making process, no matter how important the decision seems to be.Gladwell describes how most of our decisions are based on our gut feeling and what happens when we listen to our intuition instead of over-thinking and creating endless pro-contra lists.“If we are to learn to improve the quality of the decisions we make, we need to accept the mysterious nature of our snap judgments.”

Blink by Malcolm Gladwell

21 Lessons For The 21st Century summarizes today’s highlights in terms of politics, culture, and economics in a way everybody can relate and still make up their own opinion.<blockquote>“In a world deluged by irrelevant information, clarity is power.”</blockquote>

21 Lessons For The 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari

This book is the ultimate must-read for anyone who wants to level up her performance and life in general.“Be more intentional about who you want to become. Have vision beyond your current circumstances. Imagine your best future self, and start acting like that person today.”

High Performance Habits by Brendon Burchard

It’s basically a look into all the lessons Oprah learned throughout the past decades.She openly shares all the struggles she faced and the lessons learned on her path to becoming one of the most influential people of today’s wold.<blockquote>“What I know for sure is that every day brings a chance for you to draw in a breath, kick off your shoes, and step out and dance — to live free of regret and filled with as much joy, fun, and laughter as you can stand.”</blockquote>

What I Know For Sure by Oprah

This one is a fantastic step-by-step guide on how to create a happier, more joyful life without much effort.Rubin describes her own happiness project, which she practiced for 12 months and openly shares which strategies best worked for her and how you can apply them as well.“The belief that unhappiness is selfless and happiness is selfish is misguided. It’s more selfless to act happy. It takes energy, generosity, and discipline to be unfailingly lighthearted, yet everyone takes the happy person for granted.”

The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin

Jen Sincero talks about topics like the law of attraction and <a href="https://medium.com/publishous/how-i-manifested-my-first-5-000-month-on-medium-88966064b346" target="_self">manifestation</a> in a way everybody can understand and apply the lessons.An absolute recommendation for anyone who wants to make the universal laws work for them and finally attract all their biggest desires.<blockquote>“You’ve gotten to where you are right now by doing whatever it is you’re doing, so if you’re less than impressed with your current situation, you clearly need to change things up.”</blockquote>

You Are A Badass by Jen Sincero

The 4-Hour Workweek is a bible for personal growth and business.Ferriss teaches so many strategies on how to live better and build lasting, automated businesses. This sounds like too much to cover in a single book, but he truly delivers the value.&nbsp;<blockquote>“Doing less meaningless work, so that you can focus on things of greater personal importance, is NOT laziness. This is hard for most to accept, because our culture tends to reward personal sacrifice instead of personal productivity.”</blockquote>

The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss

Best books to read in 2020: Must-read books about personal development, creativity, business, and how to succeed in life. Books to read for a better life.

If You Only Read A Few Books This Year, Read These

H ighlighting even a phrase in a writer’s piece means they get a notice that you have indeed read it. They get an e-mail and the Bell lights up. While clapping for someone on the other hand can get lost among the claps of others, unless the writer takes the time to search out everyone who has clapped for them for that particular piece. So…&nbsp;

Just A Tiny Bit Of Venting

Highlighting even a phrase in a writer’s piece means they get a notice that you have indeed read it. They get an e-mail and the Bell lights up. While clapping for someone on the other hand can get…

How Medium Turns Highlighting Into A Lowlight

Let’s start with some venture math assumptions:&nbsp;<ul><li>An early-stage venture fund is going to invest in 20 companies&nbsp;</li><li>The fund aims to get a 3x gross return&nbsp;</li><li>The expected distribution of outcomes is: 1/3 losses, 1/3 money-back, 1/3 successes&nbsp;</li><li>The expected distribution of the successful outcomes is: 1 home-run (a company returning the entire fund) + 5 meaningful exits (companies returning the amount required up to 3x gross fund return.)</li></ul>A meaningful exit can be defined as a company about to return 1/3 of the fund.

Defining a meaningful exit

Before we can determine the revenue targets, again, we need some more assumptions:&nbsp;<ul><li>A SaaS company with 75% gross margin can be sold for 5x ARR&nbsp;</li><li>A marketplace company with 15% take rate can be sold for 1x the last twelve months gross merchandise value&nbsp;&nbsp;</li><li>An e-commerce company with 30% gross margin can be sold for 2x the LTM revenues&nbsp;</li><li>In all cases, Net Debt at the time of exit equals zero, so Enterprise Value = Equity Value&nbsp;</li><li>In all cases, the same growth rate is assumed&nbsp;</li></ul>

Determining the Revenue Targets for Meaningful Exits

<ul><li>&nbsp;Not every company can grow quickly enough to generate Venture-Scale returns. A VC should only invest in the companies with that potential.</li><li>The fund size determines what a meaningful exit is.&nbsp;</li><li>Some investors aim only at potential home-run exits. Others don’t. Both strategies have been proven successful over time.&nbsp;</li><li>Use your gross margin and growth rate to determine the multiple you get in an exit.</li><li>Compare the growth rates required to hit that target given your current level. Compare those rates to those of the most successful companies.</li></ul>

Final Remarks

The purpose of this post is to derive the size in terms of revenues that a company has to achieve in a 5–7 years time window to be regarded as attractive for VC investment. We will do that for different fund sizes (Micro $50Mm- $100Mm, traditional $350Mm and MEGA $1b VC funds) and different startup business models (Saas, Marketplaces, E-Commerce) this might also be helpful for the company and its investors to plan revenue targets and required growth rates for the years ..

Deriving the size of revenue by companies

The bigger the fund, the bigger the exit required to be considered meaningful.&nbsp;Assuming that the VC is going to construct a 20% ownership in a successful company over time, we can calculate how much a company must be sold to be considered a meaningful exit.&nbsp;&nbsp;

The size of a meaningful exit

The purpose is to help find the size in terms of revenues that a company has to reach in a 5-7 years time window to be considered attractive for VC investment.This will be done for different fund sizes (micro, traditional and mega VC funds) and other startup business models (SaaS, marketplaces, e-commerce). This could also help the company and its investors to plan revenue targets and required growth rates from first investment to exit.

Attractive VC exits

The purpose of this post is, with the help of some venture math and a bunch of frequently made assumptions, to derive the size in term of revenues that a company has to achieve in a 5–7 years time…

Meaningful VC Exits

All the Public Startup Pitch Decks in One Place

📈 Coinbase ( 2012, Seed  ); C ommentary  on the round by Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase. 📈 Uber ( 2008, Seed  ) 

Actual Fundraising Pitch Decks

<ul><li>📈 adpushup (2017, Seed ) </li><li>📈 AirBnB (2009, Seed ) </li><li>📈 AppNexus (2007, Seed ) </li><li>📈 Bliss (2017, Seed ) </li><li>📈 Boomtrain (2014, ? ) </li><li>📈 Buffer (2011, Seed ) </li><li>📈 BuzzFeed (2008, Series A ) </li><li>📈 Castle (2017, Seed ) </li><li> </li><li>📈 Contently (2014, Series B ) </li><li>📈 Cubeit (2017, Seed ) </li><li>📈 Crew (2015, Series A ) </li><li>📈 DocSend (2013, Seed ) </li><li>📈 Dwolla (2013, Series C ) </li><li>📈 eShares; Commentary on the round by Henry Ward , CEO of eShares </li><li>📈 Foursquare (2009, Seed ) </li><li>📈 Front; Commentary on the round by Mathilde Collin , CEO of Front </li><li>📈 Gaia Design (2015, ? ) </li><li>📈 Intercom (2011, Seed ) </li><li>📈 Launchrock (2011, Seed ) </li></ul>

If a month feels like a lot of time to assemble a list of pitch decks, here’s a preview of The Open Guide to Startup Fundraising.

The Open Guide to Startup Fundraising

A few weeks ago, Joshua Levy and I announced we were starting work on The Open Guide to Startup Fundraising. To say the guide is growing to considerable size would be an understatement. As we…

nonfiction

DORIE CLARK

The Long Game

Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert

If You Only Read A Few Books This Year, Read These

Just A Tiny Bit Of Venting

How Medium Turns Highlighting Into A Lowlight