Week 48: Closing and my digital reading tech stack

Traveling, learning, tech, and getting things done.

Hey everyone!

I hope you had a good week. Mine started in Barcelona, where I attended South Summit on Monday and Tuesday and met many great people from the Spanish venture capital ecosystem. I found many of them lovely, with incredible energy in the room (or on the roof terrace), and people connected fast.

I look forward to doing more in Spain and Barcelona, and I can understand why some of my colleagues love doing business there.

Walking around in Barcelona, November 2022

Then I had one day in Berlin, and Thursday and Friday, I had a board meeting in northern Germany.

Closing

These days I am part of many negotiations and closings. Some relate to me, some, where we are involved as investors, and some, where I am more in the supervisory/ advisory role. Although I have been doing this for more than 25 years now, closing deals is something I am still learning all the time.

I like seeing closing as a process to create clarity for all involved parties and a process in which stakeholders are open about their wishes and desires. Often it is about finding out what each stakeholder needs rather than wants and then agreeing on how these needs can be fulfilled. In my experience, these are the most sustainable deals. I know there are also other approaches to dealmaking, like win/lose and information asymmetry deals, but my personal experience is that these are, most of the time, deals that can only be made once.

When it comes to the closing of a deal that is agreed to, technical closing is also essential. It makes sense to identify the technicalities as early as possible and involve all the stakeholders as early as possible. For example, closing a venture fund involves quite a lot of stakeholders. The investors and the people running the fund are only two of the many stakeholders who need to get their work done before you can start doing what you want: invest in the best founders. There are lawyers, service companies, and approvals by regulators involved, and you will most likely also have companies supporting you with onboarding, information sharing, KYC (knowing your customer), anti-money laundering, and some other parties and steps before being able to start.

In my experience, it is helpful getting the very operational and sometimes mundane tasks and topics out of the way: what needs to be signed, by whom in which order, and how will the actual signature happen? Is a notary required, or is a “we are ok with this” documented by email/ message enough? Creating clarity around this and sharing a time plan with all shareholders will not get the deal done but will make focusing on the essential things much more accessible.

My digital reading tech stack

I have made a few changes to how I read. As most of you know, I am super curious, and learning things and trying out new ways to learn are some of my energy sources. Reading is one of my primary channels to learn, and this is how I read these days digitally:

• Any digital newsletter, post, or article I want to read gets into Matter. Nearly all my subscribed newsletters land in the inbox there.

  • My newsletter subscriptions land in my inbox automatically

  • When I get a link sent by email, I add it to Matter

  • When I see something while browsing, I use the matter plugin to send it to my inbox

  • When I read something on Twitter I want to remember, I forward it to my inbox.

  This is how I capture everything.

• When I read digital books on kindle or Apple Books, the highlights get synched to Readwise automatically. (This is some of what I read)

• I then read, highlight, and annotate them when I find something memorable in the matter reader through my browser, cellphone, and tablet.

• Every highlight and note gets then automatically synched to Readwise.

• With the data in Readwise, I do three things:

  • I sync my Readwise database with RoamResearch. (see below)

  • I use the email feature of Readwise to send me one email daily with 8 highlights from things I read. Some of them are from recent articles, and some from long ago. This way, I receive a load of inspiration every day before lunch. And the way my brain works, the highlights unlock the pieces again.

  • Readwise generates a random weekly email with some of my highlights you can subscribe to.

• In the end, everything is in my RoamResearch graph.

  • This is how I have a fully searchable and tagged database of everything I want to remember.

  • Once every week, I review all the things I have captured and process them: I tag and highlight some I find particularly interesting. This way, I build a more aggregated database of the key insights and learnings from what I read each week.

  • I experimented with auto-tagging and other knowledge management/ databases (Notion and Tana). I am excited to see how I can use AI and support processing in my second brain.

What I read and played around with

I did not watch and read too much this week while traveling. This is what I want to share:

• Play around with ChatGPT.

• I had fun reading “how to sign off an email” in the Economist

• Spend some time with EIF’s research and market analysis.

• Liked: These 20 pieces of gear changed backpacking forever

• Keep asking myself if I need this.

I hope there was something meaningful for you in this week's email. Have a great week! There is a chance mine will be nice: we have a magnetic week (this means the whole team will be in Berlin; I will write more about this in next week’s email). And I have some lovely evening events, and hopefully, positive topics and developments are coming up. Wish me luck!

Cheers

Joerg