Most of what I really need to know about how to
live and what to do and how to be, I learned in the glory days of the late
‘90s.
Wisdom was not at the top of a sound
business model, but there in the VC playpen of a new industry.
These are the things I learned:
Spend everything.
Work like there’s no tomorrow. Hire more people than you need. Create things now, let someone else worry about maintaining them. We’re all in this
mess together.
Acquire what is not yet yours. Say you're sorry when you lay somebody off.
Venture capital is for burning. Spend.
Buzzwords are good for you. Penetrate a vertical.
Learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day for around twelve hours.
Beer is for lunch.
When you go for your
IPO, watch for suckers’ money, hold your breath and stick it to ‘em.
Be aware of
stock prices. Remember the little seed in the plastic cup. The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but somebody funded it.
Goldfish and
hamsters and
white mice and even the little seed in the plastic cup--they all get acquired or file
Chapter 11. So do we.
And then remember the made-for-television movie about
Gates and
Jobs and the first word you learned, the biggest word of all:
license.
Everything you need to know is in there somewhere. The
market and
greed and basic
deception.
Economy and
office politics and the insane squandering of
wealth.
Think of what a better world it would be if we all--the whole world--had venture capital to burn and no sense of commercial
responsibility whatsoever.
Or if we had a basic policy in our companies to always skin our investors and spread their remains all over the
internet. And it is still true, no matter how old you are, when you go out into the market, it is better do it with
someone else’s money.