Friday, February 8, 2013

"VC Turned Entrepreneur"

Venture capitalist to entrepreneur, not something you see very often.
"Fundamentally VCs are risk adverse – they want no risk in the deal, if we could handle risk we'd be entrepreneurs."
– Victor Westerlind, General Partner at Cleantech VC firm Rockport Capital
And that's the truth.
From the Points and Figures blog:
Mark Suster writes a great blog, Both Sides of the Table.  He is an entrepreneur turned VC.  A lot of times, that’s what happens.  Marc Andreesen was an entrepreneur turned VC.  Brad Feld, entrepreneur turned VC.  In Chicago, Eddie Lou was a VC that became an entrepreneur!
Eddie is the CEO of Shiftgig.
Recently he was profiled in an article in Technori.  It’s an interesting read.  Here are four tips to becoming an successful entrepreneur.
  1. Pursue the right idea, at the right time
  2. Build a great team
  3. Learn to sell
  4. Create a great culture
All these are easy to type and tough to accomplish.  That’s what makes entrepreneurship so hard.  Waverly Deutsch a professor of entrepreneurship at Chicago Booth told me once she invested in one of the first e-book companies. Sounds like a massive winner right?  However, she did it in the early 1990′s and the world, nor the technology wasn’t up to speed yet.  It took the Kindle to make ebooks take off....MUCH MORE
April 13, 2003