Finance

I am a wonderful person to pitch. You walk in with your idea, and ten minutes later I'm at the whiteboard sketching out a path to daylight, just as excited as you are. It's genuine. And it tells you absolutely nothing about what I'll be like two years from now, when you've missed plan three quarters in a row and need to come back to me for more money. That's the trouble with how founders pick investors. You're judging them during courtship — the one moment they're guaranteed to be on their best behavior. Everybody's founder-friendly when they want in.  What you actually need to know is how they behave after the money is in the bank. Especially when things go wrong. And things go wrong. In 2000, at the bottom of the dot-com crash, Reed and I flew to Dallas to try to sell Netflix to Blockbuster for $50 million. They laughed us out of the room.  When we got home we laid off a third of the company. Nobody was courting anybody anymore. So do more reference checking than you think is necessary — and don't waste it on the winners. Of course the founders who sold for nine figures love their investors. Everybody's a great partner when the chart goes up and to the right. Go find the companies that pivoted, missed their numbers, or quietly shut down. They aren't on the portfolio page so you'll have to dig. Then ask those founders what happened when they disagreed. What happened when they needed more money. And what happened when the company stopped growing quickly and stopped being exciting. Money is the same no matter who you get it from. But a good partner is priceless.

This time Is different We don't often say that about the Fed, but after yesterday's FOMC meeting, we think it may actually be true. In fact, we believe yesterday's meeting ushered in a new era of monetary policy in the United States.    For the better part of two decades, monetary policy has followed a familiar playbook: extensive forward guidance, frequent communication, data dependence and the  Federal Funds rate as the primary policy tool. While leadership has changed, the broader framework has remained remarkably consistent.   What we heard yesterday suggests the possibility of a meaningful evolution.   We believe the Fed may be moving toward a framework that places less emphasis on signaling every move in advance and more emphasis on assessing where inflation, employment and broader economic conditions are heading. In a world of real-time data and increasingly sophisticated analytics, that could prove to be a healthier and more effective approach.   We also continue to hear indications that the policy toolkit could broaden beyond the overnight policy rate, with greater consideration of balance sheet policy, liquidity conditions, money supply dynamics and longer-term interest rates.   Importantly, change does not automatically mean more volatility. A broader set of tools and a more forward-looking approach could ultimately increase confidence in policy outcomes rather than diminish it.   For investors, the near-term message remains straightforward: inflation is still above target and remains the Fed's primary focus. While rate hikes are far from certain, they remain a possibility that markets need to respect.   That's one reason we continue to favor income-oriented fixed income opportunities over pure interest-rate expressions. And when markets overreact to uncertainty around policy change, we think there may be opportunities to sell volatility rather than buy it.   This time may indeed be different, and it will be fascinating to watch how this evolution in monetary policy unfolds. The real question is whether less signaling creates more uncertainty, or ultimately more confidence in the Fed's ability to achieve its objectives.

If you want to catch a glimpse of where the energy system is heading, take a look at where the capital is flowing. The International Energy Agency (IEA)'s latest report makes the direction unmistakable: towards renewables, grids, and electrification. Electricity-related spending already makes up nearly 60% of all global energy investment, with renewables remaining the largest single category. The recent acceleration in grid investments is undeniably good news. Yet, fixing the grids remains a crucial mission before they become even more of a bottleneck. Overall, the speed of this transition is still striking, as well as the fact that it has held steady throughout changes in the geopolitical landscape. This unwavering momentum reveals a strong commitment to confronting a defining challenge of this decade: Now more urgent than ever, the goal is to build resilient energy systems that minimise structural dependencies and are designed for rising electricity demand.