A number of people have
written in and correctly identified the Adventure reference of my blog
title. Here’s the full reference and why
I chose it as the title for my ramblings.
When I was a kid I used to love
playing “Adventure” (written
by Will Crowther
and Don Woods back in the late 70’s). My dad worked for Digital Equipment Corporation, so I was rarely without
a computer of some sort (terminals in those days; first with a 300 baud modem
and eventually a super speedy 2400 baud model that didn’t even require you to
insert your phone receiver into two plastic cup things to make the connection –
you could actually plug your phone line directly into the modem!). I also had basically unlimited VAX time since
I could log into an account my dad set up for me pretty much any time from
home. I liked computers and spent a lot
of time trying to write up rudimentary BASIC code and, of course, playing
Adventure. I eventually mapped out the
entire adventure world (I still have the pencil written map in a box of
memorabilia from my childhood).
I remember that one of the
hardest things to map was the “twisty maze of passageways, all alike” (also
knows as the Pirate’s Maze). The first few times I ended up in this maze I
just gave up and quit the game. It was a
place that basically took you around in circles and didn’t let you out. After a few tries, I realized that the way to
map the maze was to take a bunch of things into it and start dropping them in
rooms (you could pick up tools and implements along the way in Adventure). Eventually you’d get back to a room that you
had dropped something in and in this way you could actually map out the maze
(despite each room’s description being exactly the same). From there you could figure out how to get
out from any entry point (reversing your direction when you went in didn’t
work).
To a large extent this
process encompasses a lot of what I still do today. A good part of the leverage VCs bring to
their portfolio companies comes from having seen many companies go through lots
of situations and leveraging learning from the past on current situations. This sounds pretty basic – don’t make the
same mistake twice; do the stuff that worked again, etc. The trick, of course, is figuring out when
you are in the same room again since a lot of the rooms sound the same, but are
in a totally different part of the maze. This is one of the keys to successful stewardship of companies (for VCs
as well as entrepreneurs). Since the
business world is dynamic, you are never really in the exact same room again,
but one needs to learn to recognize similarities across situations and apply
past experience to the present. This is
why I think it takes real time to become a successful venture capitalist. You need to have those experiences behind you
in order to build upon them. I think it
is also one of the reasons that many successful venture capitalists have spent
some time in the operating world – it’s easier to recognize situations from the
outside if you’ve been in them before on the inside. While I think others would not emphasize this
latter point (and certainly there have been successful venture capitalists who
do not have an operating stint in their background), this is clearly a theme at
Mobius where all of the investment staff has operations experience in
their past.
On a personal note, I know
that this is one of the ways that I’ve grown the most as a venture capitalist
over the past three years – I needed to both understand how my operating
experiences relate to the current situations portfolio companies find
themselves in and I needed to build (and continue to build) a base of experience
as a VC that both helpes me to recognize what room of the maze I’m in and, importantly, where
to go from there.
sjl
The thing that makes business complicated is that the maze is constantly changing too. So even if it's the "same room" the exits are different.
Posted by: Dave Jilk | January 11, 2005 at 09:09 AM