Equity Research Template Microsoft Word' title='Equity Research Template Microsoft Word' />THE EQUITY KICKERThis is a long post 1,9. 1000 Miles Under The Colorado Sky. For those of you who are time poor heres the tltr Forward Partners operates a focused investment strategy because it helps us make better investment decisions and provide better support to our companies. Microsoft Word. Template for Calculating Equity Gaps. The GTL Centers ResearchSupported. Training Programs and Courses Training, Certification, SelfHelp and Career Training. Get the latest news and analysis in the stock market today, including national and world stock market news, business news, financial news and more. The Journal of Surgical Research publishes original manuscripts dealing with clinical and laboratory investigations pertinent to the practice and teaching of surgery. A good focus area for us is one that can generate 5. Until now we have focused on marketplaces and next generation ecommerce. Recently we evaluated lots of options and did a deep dive on Applied AI before selecting it as our next area of focus. For the three and a half years that weve been going, Forward Partners has operated a focused investment strategy. We observed that small transactions of all types are increasingly moving online and backed the companies that were helping to accelerate that trend. That meant lots of consumer and small business focused marketplaces and next generation ecommerce companies. Lost My Name, Appear Here and Thread are three of the better known examples, but overall there are 3. We chose to be focused for three reasons. First, and perhaps most important, being focused enabled us to build up expertise that resulted in better investment decisions. Specifically, we feel we have strong capabilities in working out whether customers will value products highly and whether it will be possible to market them cost effectively online. Secondly, we have seen so many similar companies now that we have a good sense of what they should be achieving by when. The following directors, Heads of Department and CEOs have signed our Pay Equity Pledge. The Pay Equity Pledge We recognise gender bias can creep into performance. We are better able to see problems coming and advise on strategies to work around them. Being expert in an area makes us better board members and hence better able to win deals with the best entrepreneurs. Finally, focusing allows us to add more value operationally so our companies can execute faster and with higher quality. The companies we back often share the same challenges as each other and because we focus our team has solved those problems many times over. However, venture capital is a dynamic business and good focus areas dont last forever. We are still seeing lots of marketplace and next generation ecommerce opportunities, but as we move into our second fund we decided to add another focus area to make sure we will continue to have enough high quality opportunities to invest in over the next four years. Our first step was to define the what we mean by a good focus area. For us the following characteristics are important Will generate 5. We can build knowledge thats broadly applicable across the focus area and gives us an advantage versus other investors. We can articulate a few underlying investment theses. We can articulate use cases. Suitable for early stage investment. The UK has some kind of advantage. Then we had a high level discussion about what areas we might focus on next. A couple of interesting things came out of that. Firstly we like to invest in sectors that are rising from the low point of the Gartner Hype Cycle. Investing at this point leverages our key capabilities of assessing whether customers will love products and whether companies will be able to market them cost effectively. If we get the timing right then mass adoption should be achievable. Investing with this strategy means we dont chase the very rapid value appreciation that sometimes occurs at the beginning of the Hype Cycle, but we think the benefits of focus outweigh the cost of the lost opportunity. The other interesting point to come out is that investing in deep tech at the very earliest stages is difficult. One of the key drivers of success for us as a fund is backing companies that make rapid progress and are able to raise up rounds a year or so after we invest. To do that they must pass valuation milestones. With ecommerce and marketplace companies those milestones relate to sales and unit economics and are easily demonstrable. Progress at deep tech companies, on the other hand, is based on internal development milestones and its difficult to predict how next round investors will respond. Until a product is released and is in the hands of customers, which can take years, the only evidence of success is internally reported improvements in algorithms and the production of code. Im sure theres a way to solve this for deep tech investments, but we havent figured it out yet. The next stage for us was to brainstorm potential areas of focus. Each member of the investment team went away and over a couple of weeks contributed ideas to a shared Google Doc. Then we reconvened with the objective of choosing a single area on which to focus. Via a process of discussion, voting and then amalgamation of ideas we decided to look seriously at making Applied AI our next focus area. That would mean investing in companies that were using well understood artificial intelligence techniques to build new and superior products. We felt that Applied AI is attractive because Its a broad enough area to generate 5. Is one where we already have knowledge and could could go on to develop a deep expertise in the different techniques and their application. Is at the right point in the Hype Cycle and plays to our strengths in evaluating demand. The major concern we had is that AI more generally has been a popular investment theme with other investors for some time and we wanted to make sure that Applied AI is sufficiently differentiated to be a viable investment focus for Forward Partners. We decided to go away and do some work to improve our understanding of the area with the aim of answering the differentiation question and convincing ourselves more generally that Applied AI has the potential to yield a flow of high quality investment opportunities over the next 3 5 years. To that end we sought to answer the following questions What are the AI techniques that can be applied cheaply and predictably by startups What capabilities do those techniques enable What use cases can these techniques be put to FAQ databases can improve customer serviceAre there enough use cases where the addition of intelligence makes the product meaningfully better How can Applied AI startups meaningfully show progress in their first year of operations How much AI talent is required at pre seed and seed stage Applied AI startups and can we find enough companies with that talent How can we add value to Applied AI companiesWhat are some hypothetical strategies for Applied AI startups to obtain the data they need to train their algorithms Addressing the cold start problem. The first three of these questions relate to the size of the opportunity set. To choose Applied AI as a focus area we had to believe there is the potential for 5. To get an answer we mapped an extensive list of Applied AI techniques against the Gartner Hype Cycle, and put them into a spreadsheet linking them to the capabilities they enable, then linked those use cases to capabilities, and finally the use cases to ideas for companies. Lenovo T61 Mini Card Driver'>Lenovo T61 Mini Card Driver. After that we scored the company concepts based on their attractiveness as Forward Partners investments and looked to see how many high scoring opportunities there were. Fortunately there were many. Once we had comfort on the size of the opportunity we turned to the final three questions which relate to whether the opportunities will work as early stage investments. Our approach this time was to hold workshops and meetings with people who had experience of building applied AI businesses. Thank you in particular to Matt Scheybeler, Steve Crossan, and Martin Goodson for helping us with this part of the journey.