You’re joining the abundant side of market, instead of the scarcity side of the market…Why you want to join [the world of venture capital] is beyond me.
Today Fred Wilson writes:
We are crossing a huge chasm from an industrial society to an information society. And there is immense pain in that transformation.
Absolutely true. To have a measure of how painful that transformation will be, take a look at this table comparing employees and shareholders value.
Information age companies created 10x capital value (market cap) with 0.4x labor (number of employees) when compared to industrial age companies.
Leaders are not what many people think–people with huge crowds following them. Leaders are people who go their own way without caring, or even looking to see whether anyone is following them. “Leadership qualities” are not the qualities that enable people to attract followers, but those that enable them to do without them. The include, at the very least, courage, endurance, patience, humor, flexibility, resourcefulness, determination, a keen sense of reality, and the ability to keep a cool and clear head even when things are going badly. This is the opposite of the “charisma” that we hear so much about.
We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn’t build the Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build.
The temptation to quit will be greatest just before you are about to succeed.
Much of the bubble talk surrounds five companies: Groupon, LinkedIn, Zynga, Facebook and Twitter. Mr. Thiel estimates that those five companies account for three-quarters of the value of new Web companies and, he said, five companies do not make a bubble. If they did, we have bigger problems, he said. “We need technology for our society to get better in the decades ahead,” Mr. Thiel said. “So if you say there are not even five good companies, that even those five companies are fake, that is saying that our society is completely stagnant and that nothing is happening at all.
As I’m fond of saying, startup fundraising isn’t about convincing skeptics but rather finding true believers.
I see references everywhere I look.