A playbook for newly minted private equity portfolio-company CEOs

Via:  McKinsey & Company CEOs who helm companies owned by private equity (PE) firms face a leadership challenge unlike any other. They must master everything a great public- or private-company CEO does, all while operating at a higher metabolic rate. A newcomer to PE also faces the conundrum of having limited access to insight about […]

How Venture Capitalists Make Decisions

Over the past 30 years, venture capital has been a vital source of financing for high-growth start-ups. Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Gilead Sciences, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Whole Foods, and countless other innovative companies owe their early success in part to the capital and coaching provided by VCs. Venture capital has become an essential driver of economic […]

You Don’t Have to Pivot in a Crisis

VIA HBR.org When Covid-19 burst upon the scene in early 2020, startup ventures faced dramatic shifts in markets and the importance of strategic agility became axiomatic: If you wanted your venture to survive, let alone thrive, pundits (including ourselves) almost universally advocated deep internal cuts accompanied by pivots to new markets and business models. As […]

Twelve31 Ventures Acquires AltoSky, Inc.

Omaha, Nebraska December 10, 2019 – Twelve31 Group Acquires AltoSky, Inc. Twelve31 Ventures, LLC (Twelve31) announced today that it has acquired AltoSky, Inc. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. AltoSky.com is a technology hosting provider, that delivers highly scalable hosting solutions including managed hosting, dedicated hosting, virtual private servers, and shared hosting. Twleve31 Group partnered […]

From disrupted to disruptor: Reinventing your business by transforming the core

Via:  McKinsey & Company Companies must be open to radical reinvention to find new, significant, and sustainable sources of revenue. When Madonna burst onto the scene in the early 1980s, there was little reason to suspect that she’d have more than her allotted 15 minutes of fame. But in the three decades since her debut album, […]

How AI Will Change Strategy: A Thought Experiment

How will AI change strategy? That’s the single most common question the three of us are asked from corporate executives, and it’s not trivial to answer. AI is fundamentally a prediction technology. As advances in AI make prediction cheaper, economic theory dictates that we’ll use prediction more frequently and widely, and the value of complements to […]

A Short Guide to Strategy for Entrepreneurs

It sometimes appears that the traditional rules of business are being upended by today’s mega-trends of multisided platforms, big data, machine learning and AI, crowdsourcing, the internet of things (IoT), and more. These trends have transformed the world of business immeasurably. But they have certainly not repealed the timeless rules of strategy. Yet for too many entrepreneurs, […]

Strategy Making: How to Tap the Wisdom of the Crowd

Even firms that typically prefer to centralize decisions needn’t miss out on the benefits of opening up their strategy making. Strategy making has traditionally been the purview of the top management team. Leaders in the inner circle of organisations pride themselves in being the architects of their plans. Open strategy is a more recent concept […]

The Truth About Blockchain

Contracts, transactions, and the records of them are among the defining structures in our economic, legal, and political systems. They protect assets and set organizational boundaries. They establish and verify identities and chronicle events. They govern interactions among nations, organizations, communities, and individuals. They guide managerial and social action. And yet these critical tools and […]

The Firm of the Future

In the world of the firm, something is changing. It’s not that your local bookstore went out of business. Or that your taxi driver now rates you on a 5-point scale. Or that anything can now be outsourced, allowing even the smallest firms to rent capabilities on demand. It’s more profound than these. The prevailing […]