🚀 Summary

This book reads like a very long blog post revolving around the venture capital universe at a high level- what to expect from a career as a VC, stories of wins and misses by some of the biggest VCs, the skills of a successful VC, and what the long road to get there might look like. It is clear that to become a successful VC you need to be okay with hard work and be able to network pretty much all the time.

🎨 Impressions

This book is a quick read. Rivlin shadows several VCs as they carry on with their day-to-day work- including sitting with VCs to hear the founder’s pitch.

🕵 How I Discovered It

Browsing the library shelves.

✍️ My Favorite Quotes

“If you are looking to better understand the nitty-gritty of venture finance, there’s no better book than Venture Deals by Brad Feld, one of the venture world’s more well-respected practitioners, and Jason Mendelson, one of his partners. The book offers a readable primer on everything from the basics of a venture term sheet to negotiating tactics to the specific issues likely to come up at every round of funding. I’ll quote Dick Costello, the former CEO of Twitter, who said in an endorsement of the book that he wished this book had been around in his time to save him from having to learn “all the tricks, traps, and nuances on my own.”

“That’s what’s scary about being a venture capitalist and also what makes it so fascinating a world. “This is a business about risk,” Ibrahim observed. “The people who are rewarded are the ones who stick their neck out, not the people happy in the pack.” The braver the VC, the dumber he or she is likely to look after making a mistake. “Part of being a VC is the risk of making a really stupid investment,” she said.”