January 2014
Beginner
288 pages
4h 57m
English
book
The Little Book of Venture Capital Investing: Empowering Economic Growth and Investment Portfolios
by Louis C. Gerken, Wesley A. Whittaker
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter One
An Historic Overview of Venture Capitalism
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
—George Santayana
Why is an historical overview of VC important? Because history does in fact repeat itself, and a study of history allows us to frame an understanding of the present and the future. The players and the investment climate change, but the entrepreneur’s innate instinct to risk capital for a return is no different today from what it was when John D. Rockefeller became America’s first billionaire in 1900. When Andrew Carnegie joined forces with his childhood friend, Henry Phipps, to form Carnegie Steel in 1892, they were driven by the same conviction to improve the status quo as are the idealistic dream chasers of the twenty-first century. It was these early trailblazers who paved the way and developed the techniques that have laid the foundation for VC as we know it today.
Arguably, historians will debate the nature of history and its usefulness. This includes using the discipline as a way of providing perspective on the problems and opportunities of the present. I believe it to be an important tool in providing a systematic account and window to the future. It is patently dishonest and irresponsible to perpetuate the popular mythology that those who created great wealth in America are to be despised and that there are no useful lessons to be learned from an objective, historical review of their contributions to the subject at hand. As John F. Kennedy ...
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.