Stay In Your Overlaps

Your competitive advantage as a maker and/or an investor is your clarity and discipline around the overlaps of your interests and beliefs.

Your competitive advantage as a maker and/or an investor is your clarity and discipline around the overlaps of your interests and beliefs.

Aspiring entrepreneurs wonder, “how do you decide which idea is worth committing 5–10 years of your life to build?” Similarly, investors ask, “among all the pitches you get, how do you decide where to invest your energy and money?”

In 2005, I asked myself this question as an entrepreneur when founding Behance and 99U. And starting with my first angel investments in 2010, I have pondered the same question as an investor. By no means is my thesis complete, but at this point it is pretty refined. It can be summed up quickly (and graphically):

My best attempt at my own Maker/Investor Thesis. (made with iPad apps Photoshop Sketch and Paper, working together via Creative Cloud!)

The idea of Behance (to connect and empower the creative world) and the team we assembled were squarely in the overlap of the type of company I aspired to work for and the team I asp…