2019 Summer Reading List

By Vestigo Envisions — Jul 16, 2019

Summer Schedule

New England has challenging weather ten months a year. Perhaps this is why there is an unspoken accord that business slows down for a couple of months starting July 1st and that booking a meeting on a Friday in August is in slightly poor taste. Contrary to what we expected — our business has picked up noticeably over the last two summers.

Part of this is surely the maturity of our current portfolio. We have over a dozen active portfolio companies and we are constantly finding ways to lean in more aggressively to support them with capital, strategic feedback, introductions and data insights.

Another culprit of the busy summers at Vestigo could be our data-driven deal flow. While most companies in New England are slowing down, consumers continue to engage more heavily with the web, leaving tracks to the next great FinTech opportunity.

Or maybe this is just a seasonal relationship between startups and incumbents. With slower corporate sales and partnership activity, perhaps founders are using the breather to fundraise.

Whatever the reason, being a VC is more fun when you're busy. You have to say "No" to so many business plans in this industry that it can be stressful when you go through an extended period without finding a deal that you love. We are in talks with several teams that excite us right now, with any luck we'll have some big announcements for you before the season changes.

If you're a VC and have observed a correlation between your deal activity and the mercury, we'd love to hear about it at Envision@vestigoventures.com!

—Mark & Dave

Envisions Interview

Summer Update

w/ Eben Clark, Summer Associate at Vestigo Ventures

This month, we hear from Vestigo's latest summer standout, Eben Clark.

Vestigo Book Club

When you invest in bright, driven, creative people you get to crowdsource a lot of the content for your newsletter. As I do every month, I leaned heavily on Vestigo's founders and team members and assembled your summery 2019 reading list!

You can't begin any summer reading list without appropriate travel material. For those of you going to China or Scandinavia, our resident Pangaean Mark Casady has you covered. Graham Allison has written a chilling perspective on Sino-American relations in the 21st century called Destined for War. From Alcibiades to Gorbachev, Allison draws parallels between historical episodes of conflict involving incumbent and burgeoning superpowers. Aspiring Vikings will love Beyond the Northlands by Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough. Using the great Norse sagas Barraclough focuses on oft-overlooked navigational and mercantile achievements of the Vikings during the Middle Ages.

The Long Game executive team is reading The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership. The book distills decades of work with elite CEOs by authors Diana Chapman and Jim Dethmer. Long Game CEO Lindsay Holden recommends it to anyone looking to challenge their existing beliefs about how to lead.

For the real nerds, our summer associate Eben Clark and I strongly recommend you pick up a copy of Red Rising by Pierce Brown. Imagine the Aeneid meets Game of Thrones in space — if you like fiction you will not be able to put this one (or the subsequent three novels) down.

Tommy Nicholas (Alloy CEO) is hoping to find some time to relax with his favorite author Stephen King. Next on his list is the The Shining, I thought founders were already sleep deprived?

Ian's summer reading is balanced between books on technology and personal wellness. Two of these in particular stand out: Life 3.0: Being a Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Max Tegmark and Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, PhD.

ZenLedger CEO Pat Larsen is making his case for the erudite in our portfolio and sent us four books he'll be tackling. This summer he'll be reading Loonshots by Sahfi Bahcall, Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke, What you do is who you Are by Ben Horowitz and Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing. After reading their descriptions on Amazon, this looks to be a perfect founder reading list: a guide to probabilistic thinking, fostering innovation, developing a winning business culture and an account of one of the great triumphs of the human spirit against unimaginable adversity. Thank you Pat!

Mike sent me a couple of recommendations that should be dear to Vestigo's New Englanders. The first is Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 by AnnaLee Saxenian. It attempts to uncover the reasons behind the relative decline of the 128 Corridor to the flourishing of Silicon Valley in the 1990's. The second is Valiant Ambition by Nathanial Philbrick, a character study of two of the American Revolution's great figures: George Washington and Benedict Arnold. The book describes their divergent characters and motivations which lead them to become respectively the father of the nation and one of America's most infamous villains.

This summer I'm re-reading the first novel: Homer's Odyssey. I have been enchanted by this story since boyhood and the number of details I had forgotten tells me I've been too long away from the Achaeans. Do yourself a favor and buy the W.H.D. Rouse translation. It is free from the academic prosing that has ruined Homer for too many high school students.

—Frazer Anderson, Investment Analyst

Portfolio Updates

The IRS Abbott Ruling: Everything You Need to Know

Student loans are emerging as an employee benefit, though Vault already knew it. Ryan Gardner shines light on the IRS Abbott Ruling, which paves the way for student debt repayment as a mainstream benefit. The ruling came in 2018, though Vault has been offering a similar benefit structure since 2016, putting them ahead of the curve and positioning them to take full advantage of these new rules.

Interesting Reads

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