Library
- From the Internet Archive, don’t miss the 1990 Computer Bowl (part 2). The West Coast team included John Doerr, Bill Gates, and our own Stewart Alsop, fighting for the title of Master of Computer Trivia of the World.
- Sort of like A Christmas Carol, here’s Guy Kawasaki’s classic on the top ten lies VCs tell entrepreneurs. You can read about Gilman riffing on the idea on the New York Times blog.
- Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson are providing a public service to entrepreneurs with their blog, Ask The VC. They’ve built up a broad resource that covers all the technical questions of dealing with venture capitalists: negotiating terms, building boards, and other specific issues that come up in most investments.
- Gilman has a fantastic presentation on “The Myths About Risk Taking”, although it’s better to hear him talk about it in person.
- Harvard Business School maintains a public resource of content and information that is really useful for entrepreneurs.
- In terms of public resources, it’s hard to do better than this collection of video clips, podcasts, presentations and other material about entrepreneurship, all provided by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program.
- Steve Blank has a classic presentation called “The Secret History of Silicon Valley”. Steve delivered a version of his talk at our annual meeting in 2008; the source linked here is from the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.
- Back in the early days of our fund, Stewart and Gilman gave a joint presentation on the state of the video game industry. We still refer back to this one as it became the driving motivation behind at least one of our portfolio companies.
- Gilman gave a presentation in January 2007 that explained the venture capital business to a room full of scientists. John (one of our associates) wrote another mathy project relating the venture capital business to an operations research problem.
- Our investment in Ribbit was due to one of Stewart’s blog posts on this site (you can read that story here). For our next trick, one group of corporate dinosaurs is the background check companies (e.g. Choicepoint, Equifax and so on). We’d like to build a company on the premise that everybody has facts to validate, not just recruiters.