Kawasaki learns the youngins'...
Guy Kawasaki is very fond of lists, and for my money I find his posts hit or miss. That said, he knocked one out of the park today with his friendly advice for the soon-to-be post grads who are oh-so-interested in jumping aboard the VC freight train now that the industry is solidly back in a fund flow upcycle.
The entire piece is funny yet poignant, so give it a read (if you haven't already). Here's a highlight...
The ideal venture capitalist has an engineering or a sales background. Engineering is useful because it helps you understand the technology that you’re investing in—for example, is the entrepreneur trying to defy the laws of physics? Sales is useful because every entrepreneur has to introduce a product and sell it. For the third time in this blog, let me say, “Sales fixes everything.”
The three worst backgrounds for a venture capitalist are management consulting, investment banking, and accounting. Management consulting is bad because it leads you to believe that implementation is easy and insights are hard when the opposite is true in startups. Investment banking is bad because it leads you to believe that everything can be reduced to cells on a spreadsheet and that companies should be built for Wall Street, not customers. Moreover, investment bankers are oriented towards doing deals, not building companies. Accounting is bad because it leads you to believe that history not only repeats itself, it predicts the future.
Guy's a smart guy and obviously he knows that successful VCs come from all walks of life, but at the end of the day his underlying message is that there's no substitute for life experience. This extends to all walks of professional life.
One of my colleagues is fond of saying, "you don't know what you don't know"...which isn't merely a pithy truism, it really holds water in a lot of circumstances. The older i get the more I realize how much I don't know; in fact, I would say for many of us, our actual depth of knowledge is inversely proportional to our own perception of it.
kawasaki vc vcat experience irregulars career advice investing startups woodrow
oh well - that's you and me down the toilet then.
Posted by: Dennis H | November 30, 2006 at 12:29 AM