One of the reasons I started this blog was to try to give readers some insights on life as a venture capitalist. I was reading some old posts and realized that I haven’t written on this topic in a while.
Funny thing about venture capital – something I’ve really noticed as I transitioned from supporting other partners on their deals to exclusively managing my own portfolio – it’s a pretty lonely business. I have an extremely close relationship with my partners and of course bounce thoughts, ideas and questions off of them on a regular basis (something I think we at Mobius we are extremely good at doing). But for the most part, I spend my days doing my own thing and generally have limited overlap with what they are working on (they manage their own portfolios; we intersect on fund management and looking at new investment opportunities, but that’s about it). My “colleagues” are for the most part other board members of the companies I work with and the management teams of those companies. I spend a huge amount of time with these two groups of people. I travel pretty often, but almost never with anyone else. My partners do the same. As a result we overlap in the office only one or two days per week. This kind of snuck up on me over the past 2 years but I’ve been thinking about it a lot over the last few months. For my personality this works great – I love the autonomy and have never been the kind of person who wanted or needed close supervision. But it’s definitely different than any other work I’ve done and I can’t help but think how unusual a working structure it is – something I never considered before I got into the business.
Seth, that's a great post, thanks for sharing!
I'm sort of the same way with entrepreneurship.
Before I got into it, I never spared a thought for how risky it is, seeing that I have a portfolio of one company which is more volatile and illiquid than any penny stock.
I mean, this suits me just fine because for me entrepreneurship is more of a liftyle choice - but from an asset allocation perspective, I can't help but think how unusual an entrepreneur's investment portfolio must seem to your average Wall Steet punter.
Posted by: Daniel | November 29, 2006 at 09:14 AM