Everything I Wished I had Known About Venture Capital

Really, I sincerely wished I had known all of these things about venture capital in past years and decades, both as an aspiring entrepreneur and as a VC wannabe.

Actually, in truth, there are plenty of these things that I did in fact know, but enough of them that I either didn’t know or didn’t focus enough attention on, so that I lacked a critical mass of enough of the right things to be either a successful entrepreneur or a venture capitalist.

What are these things things I wished I had known? Well, I’m actually cheating here… I don’t have my own list to offer — I’m simply going to point you to a list that I saw pop up this morning on the daily email blast of hot stories on Medium.com.

The list is courtesy of Sarah Guo, a Venture Capitalist at Greylock Partners, who offers a wealth of solid gold nuggets of knowledge in her story entitled What do I look for in a pitch?.

That’s really a relatively innocuous title for a story that contains such a wealth of information needed by both entrepreneurs and venture capitalists alike.

The story could have been just as accurately entitled:

• What very entrepreneur needs to know
• What every venture capitalist needs to know
• Why so many ventures fail
• The path to venture success
• What every limited partner needs to know about how their money is being invested

Seriously, if you want to succeed in a new venture, you really do have to nail every point that Sarah makes.

And if you fail or are in the process of failing — the reasons are there in Sarah’s paper, plain as day.

You can read my own writings on venture capital (what I know/knew, why I never made it to being a VC), but Sarah’s concise paper (14 minute read!) says it so much more succinctly and visually as well (I’m just a boring text guy.)

Enjoy. And be successful. And try not to be too evil.