Perspectives on building B2B that scales.
Go-to-market, enterprise channel access and operator-led investing, from the EvoScale team.
From Operator to Investor: Why Your Career Is the On-Ramp
Two decades of building and selling B2B has quietly assembled most of what investing in B2B requires. Why your career is the on-ramp, and why the operator edge is earned, not automatic.
What Your Enterprise Network Is Actually Worth to a Founder
For a seed-stage B2B startup, a warm path to a real enterprise buyer can be worth more than the cheque. How to value your network as an investor, and deploy it deliberately.
The Operator's Edge, and the Three Traps It Sets
The fluency that gives an operator an investing edge also sets three traps: trusting your own taste, investing through your own circle, and pattern-matching your old company. The blind spots, and the guardrails.
Reading a B2B Deal With a Buyer's Eye
A generalist sees a market; an operator who has been the buyer sees whether the sales motion is real. The four reads where a B2B deal quietly stands or falls.
How to Spot Fake Enterprise Traction
Enterprise traction is the most persuasive slide and the easiest to stage. The operator who has signed the LOIs and run the pilots can see the theater. The ladder of real commitment, and the tell for each fake.
Underwrite the People First
At the seed stage the team is most of the signal, and twenty years of hiring is a lens few investors have. How to judge founders with an operator's eye, and guard the bias it carries.
Cap Tables, SAFEs and Dilution for People Who Already Read a P&L
You read a P&L fluently; the cap table is the one financial document that runs on a different logic. The three mechanics that surprise even finance-literate operators: the SAFE overhang, the option-pool shuffle, and compounding dilution.
How Many Bets, How Big: Portfolio Math for the Part-Time Angel
Your operating instinct is one big bet; in a startup portfolio that is the dominated strategy. The power-law math of how many bets to make, how big each should be, and why breadth beats the conviction your career taught you.
The Five-Hour-a-Month Investor
You don't lack money or judgement; you lack time. A judgement-over-volume process for investing well in about five hours a month, instead of the full-time deal grind.
Investing While Employed: The Conflict-of-Interest Playbook
The quiet worry that stops more operators than any lack of money: I still have a job. The conflict-of-interest playbook for investing while still employed, green, amber and red.
Solo, a Fund, or an SPV: How an Operator Actually Invests
The vehicle decides whether your edge gets used. Solo cheques, a blind-pool fund, or a deal-by-deal SPV: what an SPV actually is, and why deal-by-deal fits an operator best.
From One Cheque to a Thesis
What separates an operator who makes a few investments from one who becomes an investor is a thesis. How to turn scattered cheques into a repeatable angle that compounds, built from your career.
How a Disciplined Investor Reads a B2B Deal
A spreadsheet scores a model; a disciplined investor judges whether the business can exist at all. The four-question first-pass screen the best investors run.
The Power Law: Why Most Startup Bets Lose, and You Still Win
Most startup investments return little; a tiny few return everything. The power law is the difference between fearing the losses and hunting the outliers.
How Many Bets? Portfolio Construction for the Power Law
How many startups to back, how much per cheque, and how much to hold in reserve. Where the power law becomes a concrete plan.
Why Enterprise Channel Access Is the Real Alpha in B2B
The hardest part of B2B isn't capital or product. It's getting into the room where enterprise decisions are made. Why operator-led access changes the odds.
The Buying Committee: Who Actually Says Yes in an Enterprise Deal
An enterprise deal is decided by a committee of 5–16 people, not one champion, and most deals stall on internal consensus, not your pitch. A field guide to who actually decides.
Why Your Enterprise Sales Cycle Is Nine Months (and How to Halve It)
The largest enterprise deals take 270 days. Most of that isn't your product being evaluated; it's trust a warm path could have transferred on day one. The data on what compresses the cycle.
Operator-Led Investing, Explained: Capital That Comes With a Channel
Capital is abundant; what's scarce is an investor who can open doors. What operator-led investing is, why it's rising, and what founders really get beyond the cheque.
What Top VCs Actually Evaluate in a B2B Startup
Startups die from three things: no demand, can't execute, can't sustain. That's exactly what a disciplined investor scores: Desirability, Feasibility, Viability.
The Approved-Vendor List: The Gate B2B Startups Forget
Winning the buyer isn't the last step; getting onto the approved-vendor list is. The procurement, security and legal gates that decide whether a startup can actually be paid.
Enterprise B2B Pricing: The Most Powerful Lever Founders Leave Alone
A 1% gain in price beats the same gain in volume or cost, yet most startups price off their own costs and, in the enterprise, too cheap can lose the deal.
The Six Numbers Behind a B2B Raise
Founders pitch a vision; a numerate investor reduces it to six numbers: growth, net revenue retention, gross margin, CAC payback, burn multiple and the Rule of 40.
Founder-Market Fit for B2B: Why It Outweighs the Idea
In B2B, who is building it often matters more than what they are building. The three pillars of founder-market fit, and why it is the heaviest input an investor weighs.
Bottom-Up Market Sizing: TAM, SAM, SOM Without the Hand-Waving
'We only need 1% of a huge market' is the line that loses investors. Bottom-up sizing, and why it beats a top-down TAM slide.
The POC That Converts: Escaping Pilot Purgatory
Most enterprise pilots don't fail; they just never end. The five design choices that turn a proof of concept into a signed contract.
Selling Into Taiwan's Top 100: Why the Network Is the Market
Taiwan's top 100 is not 100 cold targets; it is one interconnected, relationship-gated network of business groups. Why selling in turns on who you know.
Judging the Founder: What the Best Investors Look For
At the early stage the team is most of the signal, but charisma is easy to mistake for substance. What the best investors actually assess in a founder.
Judging the Market: Size, Timing, and 'Why Now'
A great team in a poor market still loses. How the best investors judge a market: real size, growth, and above all the timing question, why now.
Reading Traction Honestly: Real Signal vs Vanity Metrics
A logo slide is easy to show and easy to fake. How the best investors tell real traction from vanity, on the quality-of-revenue ladder.
The Numbers That Matter: Reading Unit Economics in Diligence
Once traction is real, the numbers decide. The few metrics that matter early, and the presentation tricks that hide weak unit economics.
Valuation and Dilution, in Plain Language
Pre-money, post-money, the option pool, and how a round dilutes everyone, explained as the simple arithmetic it is.
The Term Sheet, Demystified: The Few Terms That Matter
A term sheet looks like a wall of legal language, but most of it is standard. The handful of terms that actually decide the deal.
The Cap Table: Who Owns What, Over Time
A cap table is the company's ownership ledger, and every round rewrites it. How to read one, and why a clean cap table is an asset.
Due Diligence: What to Check Before You Wire
By now you believe in the deal; diligence is where you verify it. A checklist across commercial, financial, legal and deal, and the deal-killers.
The Investor's Mind: Biases, Temperament, and Building Your Edge
Once you have the screen, the maths and the mechanics, the last edge is psychological. The biases that cost investors returns, and the temperament that beats them.
The Reading List We Actually Recommend (and How to Read It)
A reading list circulates among Taiwan's operator-VC community. Here is our cut: the handful that earn their place for a B2B operator-investor, the ones to read with caution, and the gap the canon quietly leaves open.
From Munger to Antifragile: How Investors Actually Use These Books
Every investor's shelf holds the same judgment books. The few who compound from them convert each into one question they ask of every deal. A synthesis of Munger, Taleb, Adner and Rosling, and where the books oversell.
The Founder Canon Meets B2B Reality: Where Lean Startup and Zero to One Mislead
The Lean Startup and Zero to One are the books every founder cites, and parts of both quietly break the moment you sell to enterprises. A translation guide: keep the principle, drop the consumer feedback loop it secretly assumes.
The Operator's Shelf: What to Read When You Cross From Running Companies to Backing Them
Most startup reading lists are aimed at someone you used to be. What your operating career already covers and can skip, the investing mechanics it never taught you, and the operator's curse you have to unlearn before you pick your first deal.
What Actually Makes a Consumer Startup Grow
A consumer business is four things multiplied, not added: demand, acquisition, retention and monetization, and the weakest one caps everything. The map for this column, and the order to fix things in.
What Consumers Actually Buy: Emotion, Identity and Status
Founders describe features; consumers buy a feeling and a better version of themselves. Most of the job a product is hired to do is emotional and social, not functional, and that is the layer feature lists keep missing. How to find the real job, and build for it.
The Unit Economics of Consumer: CAC, LTV and Payback
A consumer customer is worth little alone, so the business is a bet that the average one returns more than it costs to win, fast enough. The three numbers that decide it, CAC, LTV and payback, and how decks quietly flatter all three.
Where Consumers Actually Come From: Paid, Owned and Earned
There are only three ways a stranger becomes a user: you pay for them, you own the channel, or others earn them for you. Each pays off on a different clock. Why paid betrays you as you scale, and why owned and earned compound.
Built-In Growth: Referral and Viral Loops
The cheapest user is the one another user brings. Built-in growth lowers your blended cost for free, but most features called viral are not, and the math of the viral coefficient is unforgiving. How referral and viral loops really work.
Retention Is the Business: Reading the Cohort Curve
Every other lever leaks into this one. A consumer business is its retention curve, and if it does not flatten, you are refilling a leaky bucket forever. How to read a cohort curve, what good looks like, and how retention gets faked.
Building a Product People Come Back To
A flat retention curve is not luck; it is a habit engineered into the product. The habit loop of trigger, action, variable reward and investment, how to build it, and the line between forming a habit and exploiting one.
Pricing for Consumers: Free, Freemium or Subscription
Pricing is the fastest lever on profit and the one founders touch last. For consumers the question is less which number than which model and which moment to ask. What each model fits, and where each traps you.
What Investors Look For in a Consumer Deal
Investors read a consumer deal with the same four levers a founder builds on, plus one more question that sets the size of the outcome: the moat. How demand, acquisition, retention and monetization are judged, and what makes a consumer company defensible.