Ryan Daniel Moran (speaking for Capitalism.com) recounts a hard lesson learned while operating a fund that invests in early-stage brands. They had assumed they could inject infrastructure and capital to rapidly scale promising brands ("throw gas in the fire"), but discovered many companies lacked basic foundational building blocks. As a result they dialed back their approach to implement step 1–3 (foundational operations) before attempting step 4 (accelerated growth).
So here's what we thought was going to happen is with the fund, we assumed we would take brands that were, you know, earlier stage, take those, look for them and say, hey, where can we add infrastructure and capital to throw gas in the fire that's already there? What what we ended up realizing is that some of the earlier stage businesses, the challenges we had is we're looking at five steps down the road trying to say, hey, here's what we bring to the table and we can do this, this, this and this. But in reality, there's some basic building blocks that had to be put in place there. So we really dialed that back in. Yeah. And put the step 1, 2, 3 in place to make sure that when we got to step four, throwing gas in the fire, we were actually ready to handle that growth. Yeah, that was a hard lesson to learn.
