Sublime

never would have succeeded without Langley on the team. If I were funding a startup, I wouldn't want to put money in unless I saw somebody identified as having an interest in the business development side of it. I'm an engineer by training myself, but at this point I have so much experience dealing with customers and what they want that I can bring

Some VCs court very inexperienced startups with the intention of pushing them around and telling them what to do rather than allowing the founder and CEO to run the company.

Another thought occurs to Taggar about how to assess startup ideas, one used by Sequoia Capital. “One of the big things they focus on is ‘proxy for demand.’ Which basically means when looking at some new idea, they want to see what people are doing at the moment? What kinds of crappy solutions are they hacking together at the moment.” They’ll ask f

Kleiner Perkins built a valuable keiretsu of growing companies that could share talent and resources, increasing their chances of success.

The big problem with “founders” who build a feature that a market leader will inevitably get to—and I use quotes here for a reason—is that they lack vision. The act of selecting a feature as their life’s work, as opposed to a full-blown product or a mission, disqualifies them from being a true founder.