“Venture capital is something to do at the end of your career, not the beginning” – Guy Kawasaki.

The above quote is from a recent post on Guy Kawasaki’s blog – and I have to say it’s another of Guy’s gems with which I whole-heartedly agree. It does not make sense for someone straight out of college (even with an MBA) to become a venture capitalist – the very nature of the profession demands first hand experience with the operational aspects of a startup (or three).

I’ve had this discussion many times before, both with friends and with myself (when I’ve been very tempted to leave the startup world to go and work for a VC firm), and it always comes down to this: if I was an entrepreneur seeking funding and I was going to take an investment from a venture capitalist (and in turn give her a board seat), would I want it to be a young gun with my level of experience, or someone who has already seen it all? I think you know the answer.  I firmly believe that the value of a venture capitalist is her experience, much more so than her checkbook (although don’t get me wrong, the $$’s are great :).

Here are some more interesting quotes from Guy’s post:

“Management consulting is bad because it leads you to believe that implementation is easy and insights are hard when the opposite is true in startups”

I think I must have said this exact sentence several times to a friend of mine from college who has the same ‘entrepreneurial spirit’ as I do, but has decided to go down the management consulting path, compared to the work-for-a-startup path that I have taken.

“My theory is that when you’re young, you should work eighty hours a week to create a product or service that changes the world. You should not sit in board meetings listening to an entrepreneur explaining why she missed her numbers while you read email on a Blackberry…”

Yes! Change the world while you are young and have the energy (and indeed the naivety) to be able to do it.  If you do change the world for the better, you’ll naturally accumulate wealth (ahh the beauty of capitalism), and once you have that money you’ll be in a much better position to sit on the ‘other side of the table’. In fact I posted a great quote a while back which I’ll repeat here: “There’s only one kind of happiness that money can buy, and that is the opportunity to be on the other side of the table when some bright kid comes along with a brilliant idea for a business.”

Thanks again, Guy, for posting such brilliant content on your blog. I’m happy to know there are others who feel as strongly about these sorts of things as I do – others who’s opinion does carry the weight of experience.