Venture Adventure

About once every six months or so, the meme So You Want to be a VC hits the VC blogs that I follow. As usual, the VCs post wonderful things about both being a VC and how they got there.

What seems to be lacking is an understanding of the motivation. Why does the implementor want to be a manager? Why be a VC? Why does the founder want to be CEO?

As I talk to people, I’m always curious as to their motivations. I have many friends in the engineering world, and most don’t want to be managers. Most that are managers are their because that’s the only career progression to them. And those that really want to be managers usually understand that management is not just a step on the career ladder, but is a jump to a completely different job, with different requirements, tasks, risks and rewards.

I’ve also talked with a number of people, primarily while at SCU B-School, about why they want to be a VC. We even had some VC alums come and talk on that specific topic. The consensus seems to be that VCs get rich quick, and that they have first access to cool toys. But, of course, getting rich quick is not a job description, and most of these people are motivated by the money rather than the job.

The same goes true for many of the Founder/CEOs I’ve talked to over the years at the plethora of entrepreneurial/startup events I’ve attended. The typical founder/CEO is motivated to be a CEO as the path to wealth. But gaining wealth is really an insufficient motivator for the CEO role.

The CEO is responsible for many things - balancing risk/reward; employees concerns vs. customer concerns vs. board concerns; resource allocations; ROI; etc.

But, ultimately, as the Founder/CEO, I’m the father of the business. I give birth to the business through my ideas. I gather the resources required to help my baby grow. I work with my team, so that we all have the same goals for our child. I help our child to grow. Eventually, we have built a business that is successful and can stand on its own without my help.

There is a beauty and creativity to this that I cannot really express, nor can I find in any of my other activities. It’s this creativity and beauty that really motivates me.

I’ve never been a fan of twitter - it’s yet another disjoint communications medium that has a different UI, a different MO, and can be a real time-waster.  However, Larry on Found|Read gives us the new rules for twitter networking. The raw analysis is:

Basically, let’s take networking and make it more convoluted by throwing twitter into the mix.  But why?  Why oh why do you want to do this?

All I can think of is twitter buzzkill.

Sam Butrous, who I met at the CMU Startup meetup on Monday, found this.

July, 1992. I was taking a race-engine design/build class. I can’t remember who gave the class, but he was a good friend of Roy Howell, the Chief Chemist for Redline Oil. Roy came and gave us a talk about oils, and then we went out to dinner (I want to say at the Peppermill, on DeAnza, but my memory could be failing me).

Before the web, we actually communicated this information through mail lists. This one went to the Wheel to Wheel mailing list, which is still in operation 16 years later.

It’s nice that the Vintage Triumph Register reformatted it in HTML, but they missed on the crude ASCII graphics. Ironically, I was racing a Triumph Spitfire 1300cc in F-Prod at the time.

Stuff that I wrote pre-web is turning up in searches.  The Internet really is The Archive!

I attended the CMU Alumni Startup Meetup yesterday at the District Wine Bar, in San Francisco.  As is typical for a geek oriented fest, no one realized that it was also an SF Giants game.  The District is located just a few blocks from PacHell ATT park, so the very convenient across the street parking garage was charging a $25 flat fee.  I dropped the coin rather than spending an hour circling the area trying to find cheaper parking (and in the 4Runner, it would probably cost me as much in gas anyway).

I met a lot of very nice folks there, although much less than the 52 that RSVPd.  Probably more like 25 or 30 people.  No women, and, as I didn’t see anyone else who graduated before 1990, I was probably the oldest one there.

Most of the people where dot-com folks, with a few others sprinkled in.  I met one software developer who sold his company, and now he and his friends manage and invest their personal funds.  They actively participate in their investments, so it’s more like a buy-in than an angel operation.

Another person was a died-in-the-wool New Yorker whose original company was purchased and moved to Florida, so he ended up there, and starting another company.  Not liking Florida (as almost anyone who’s spent time there learns to hate it), he moved to San Francisco last year, while still working remotely.

There were a bunch of youngsters, graduating after 2000, with one who’d just graduated (’07).  Another ‘00 left Sun and took 9  months off, spending 6 months traveling the world, and was now looking for a job.

Unfortunately, I had to leave fairly early.

In the past, I have discussed creating a Microsoft Exchange replacement.  While everyone seems to want it, the market is very iffy.  If you sell a server product, you end up competing directly with Microsoft, and they’re not eager for that, so getting access to their libraries is very difficult.

Thus, the plan had been to offer exchange as a SaaS solution.  But there, it turns out, you’re competing against people who are doing just a hosted Exchange solution, which Microsoft now allows.  By hosting Exchange directly, you also get the advantage of Blackberry support, as well as other smart phone support through third-party plug-ins.

We’d have to do a lot of engineering in order to get to where MS is.  Even factoring in the cost savings from hosting this on Amazon, etc., there wasn’t enough financial upside to make this worth it.

I’m in the business of making money, not losing money.  When we realized that the project wasn’t a money maker, we stopped.

Now we’re on to something where there’s a path to profitability.  Details to come….