Some Take-aways

William Draper III:

P158: it is common for venture capital firms to collaborate on deals in pairs or groups of three to 1) share risk and 2) at the outset to spread relatively small pools of money into a larger number of deals.

P165: In 1994, a decade after the time spent in Washington, the VC industry transformed from being cooperative to competitive as big money comes the valley. -- further confirmed by Franklin Pitch Johnson after the 2000 dot-com bubble (P238)

Dick Kramlich:

P180: some culture of NEA has never changed: always maintained a democracy among the partners, wherein they all have the same draw from the firm's fee and the same participation in the carried interest, or investment profits, from their funds. (profit-sharing)

P189: (The search for Solar) knowledge transmission from one portfolio firm to other related portfolio firms

P190: flight to quality after the dot-com bubble. When NEA went to raise the next fund in 2000 Sept., its $1.5B target wounded up with $2.3B in commitments.

P192: biosimilars

Franklin (Pitch) Johnson:

P229: The Small Business Investment Company program that started in 1958

P231: "The Latin root of innovation is novo, which means 'to renew'. We weren't renewing things, we do better: We were inventing them and then repeating the ones that worked."

P235: Mitch kapor, a former VisiCalc employee, developed Lotus 1-2-3 that essentially ate up the VisiCalc market circa 1983. Lesson: a successful firm need to control its own development process -- a feature missing in VisiCorp that lead to Bob Noyce's declination of initial investment.