Venture Capitalists at Work How Vcs Identify and Build Billion-Dollar Successes

Venture Capitalists at Work How VCs Identify and Build Billion-Dollar Successes

Tarang Shah Sheetal Shah

Venture Capitalists at Work Copyright © 2011 by Tarang Shah and Sheetal Shah All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, record- ing, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and the publisher. ISBN-13 (pbk): 978-1-4302-3837-9 ISBN-13 (electronic): 978-1-4302-3838-6 Trademarked names may appear in this book. Rather than use a trademark symbol with every occurrence of a trademarked name, we use the names only in an editorial fashion and to the benefit of the trademark owner, with no intention of infringe- ment of the trademark.

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For our son Raj, our parents, and Gurudev

Contents

Foreword by Gus Tai...... vii Foreword by George Zachary...... ix About the Authors ...... xi Acknowledgments...... xiii Introduction...... xvii

Chapter 1: Roelof Botha, Sequoia Capital: YouTube, Xoom, Green Dot, Dropbox, AdMob ...... 1 Chapter 2: Mike Maples, FLOODGATE Fund: Twitter, Chegg, Digg, Demandforce, ngmoco:), SolarWinds, ModCloth ...... 11 Chapter 3: George Zachary, Charles River Ventures: Twitter, Yammer, Millennial Media, Jambool, Scribd, Metaplace ...... 23 Chapter 4: Sean Dalton, Highland Capital Partners: Starent Networks, Altiga Networks, Telica, PA Semi...... 39 Chapter 5: Alex Mehr, Zoosk...... 55 Chapter 6: Howard Morgan, Idealab: Overture/GoTo, Citysearch, eToys, Snap; First Round Capital: Mint, myYearbook ...... 75 Chapter 7: Tim Draper, DFJ: Baidu, Skype, Overture, Hotmail, Parametric Technologies, Focus Media, AdMob...... 91 Chapter 8: Osman Rashid, Chegg...... 101 Chapter 9: Harry Weller, NEA: Groupon, Opower...... 115 Chapter 10: David Cowan, Bessemer Venture Partners: LinkedIn, Smule, Zoosk...... 133 Chapter 11: Michael Birch, Bebo, Birthday Alarm ...... 149 Chapter 12: Mitchell Kertzman, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners...... 165 Chapter 13: Scott Sandell, NEA: Salesforce, WebEx, Bloom Energy ...... 177 Chapter 14: Gus Tai, Trinity Ventures: Blue Nile, Photobucket, Modulus, zulily, Trion Worlds ...... 191

v Chapter 15: Steven Dietz, GRP Partners: DealerTrack, TrueCar, Bill Me Later, Koral, UGO Entertainment...... 209 Chapter 16: Paul Scanlan, MobiTV ...... 219 Chapter 17: Ann Winblad, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners: Hyperion, The Knot, Dean & Deluca, Net Perceptions ...... 237 Chapter 18: Jim Goetz, Sequoia Capital: AdMob ...... 253 Chapter 19: Roger Lee, Battery Ventures: Groupon, Angie’s List, TrialPay ...... 259 Chapter 20: Ken Howery, Founders Fund: PayPal, Facebook, SpaceX, ZocDoc...... 275 Chapter 21: Alfred Lin, Sequoia Capital: Zappos...... 289 Chapter 22: Kevin Hartz, Xoom, Eventbrite ...... 301 Chapter 23: Eric Hippeau, Lerer Ventures; SoftBank Capital: The Huffington Post, Yahoo!, Danger...... 315 Chapter 24: David Lee, SV Angel: Twitter, Foursquare, Flipboard, Dropbox, AirBnB..... 327 Chapter 25: Ted Alexander, Mission Ventures: MaxLinear, RockeTalk, Enevate ..... 337 Chapter 26: Robert Kibble, Mission Ventures: Greenplum, Shopzilla, Sandpiper Networks ...... 353 Chapter 27: Rajiv Laroia, Flarion Technologies ...... 365 Chapter 28: Jim Boettcher and Kevin McQuillan, Focus Ventures: PCH International, Starent, Pure Digital, PA Semi, Aruba Networks, Financial Engines, Centrality, DATAllegro...... 379 Chapter 29: Mike Hodges, ATA Ventures: Tellium, Zoosk, Biometric Imaging ...... 393 Chapter 30: Alan Patricof, Greycroft Partners: Apple, AOL, Office Depot, Audible, The Huffington Post...... 409 Chapter 31: Ben Elowitz, Blue Nile, Wetpaint ...... 419 Chapter 32: Vish Mishra, Clearstone Venture Partners: PayPal, Overture, Cetas, Mimosa, Ankeena, Kazeon ...... 429 Chapter 33: Rich Wong, Accel Partners: Angry Birds, Atlassian, AdMob, 3LM...... 437 Chapter 34: Randy Komisar, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers: LucasArts, WebTV, TiVO, Pinger, Transphorm ...... 443 Chapter 35: Peter Wagner, Accel Partners: Fusion-io, Opower, ArrowPoint Communications, Riverbed Technology, Redback Networks...... 459 Index ...... 471

vi Foreword

There have been a number of books written on venture capital, but very few capture its heart and soul. Ostensibly, venture capital is about predicting the future. Venture capitalists predict a distinct type of future: one where a new- comer unexpectedly seizes a discontinuity, and transforms the way societies and businesses behave. The fastest-growing transformations at first appear innovative yet dubious. But they quickly mature into something that feels familiar and perhaps obvious. Such were the cases for companies like You- Tube, Facebook, Groupon, LinkedIn, and Twitter, all mentioned in this book. In this sea of potential, what a venture capitalist does is assess the future of the start-ups that he or she meets. But what’s often underappreciated is that at its core, venture capital is in- tensely personal. It is an unnerving task. What is obvious is often less valuable. What is dubious might become the next big winner. To manage the ambiguity, a VC will use his or her history, expertise, and outlook as guideposts in decision making. He or she will draw upon his or her partnership for input and insight. However, in a world where a start-up’s uniqueness often wins big— and conventionality might not win at all—there’s a premium for original think- ing. At the end of the day, it’s a deeply personal process that a venture capitalist goes through to render a decision. Equally personal is what happens after funding a start-up. After funding, a venture capitalist then focuses on doing whatever he or she can to help improve the start-up’s ability to thrive. Sometimes that means doing nothing at all. At other times, it means bringing institutional and personal resources to bear in ways that are handcrafted for that company. Start-ups are as deeply personal as the VCs and their firms. Imagine Facebook without Mark Zuck- erberg: Might it look like Apple without Steve Jobs? What a good venture capitalist does is personalize the resources to reflect the people, culture, and situation at the start-up at that moment. Given the deeply personal nature of venture capital and entrepreneurship, it’s no surprise that I would highly recommend Tarang Shah’s book, Venture Capitalists at Work. This book captures the personalities and approaches of a number of leading VC practitioners as they discuss their work. It displays the heart and soul of the venture capital process, by offering an exclusive

vii window into the voice of the practitioners. What you’ll find is that each VC has a unique point of view. Yet when you step back from this collage of discussions, you’ll sense some core fundamentals important to all successful start-ups. Fundamentals such as: • Creating customer delight efficiently; • Building passion into the team’s culture; • Scaling the company beyond $100 million in revenue; and • Daring to be authentic so that you can dare to be great. Each of the interviewees may prioritize these fundamentals differently, but all of the VCs have approaches on how to accomplish them. The variety of approaches simply reflects the personal uniqueness of investors and teams. I find the depth and candidness of the interviews remarkable, but I guess not surprising. The rich material reflects the respect that we in the industry have for Tarang Shah. His reach within the tight venture capital industry is quite unusual but reflective of his character. As a side benefit from reading this book, I believe there’s a personal lesson in here on how to lead with integrity, sincerity, and goodwill, as my good friend Tarang does. While aspiring venture capitalists should find this book as the go-to reference guide for developing one’s own venture style, Venture Capitalists at Work should appeal more broadly to all entrepreneurs, as well as to followers of technology and technology investing. Entrepreneurs should benefit from hav- ing access to robust discussions on how to build fundamentally sound start- ups. Given that common start-up problems are discussed by several VCs, entrepreneurs facing those problems can extract from the interviews the nuances of approaches and tailor a solution that personally suits them. Fur- ther, there is a trove of real-life examples of successful decisions (and some less successful) that contributed to a start-up’s success. If an entrepreneur can learn and benefit from one of these examples, they can save valuable time and resources. By reading this book, technology enthusiasts and investors will develop a deep sense for how entrepreneurs, technology, and discontinuities manifest themselves into much larger, life-changing trends. Technology disruptions are happening at an accelerating pace. This book will help you see these trends as they emerge, and ride the waves more gracefully. You’ll get answers to questions like, “Why was Twitter funded? What contributed to its success?” For investors, perhaps you’ll see answers to the question, “What’s the next Twitter?” For this last question, I believe the answers are in here. —Gus Tai Trinity Ventures viii Foreword

For years, I have been asked to contribute to various works on venture capital. And for the first time, I found the spirit and focus of Tarang Shah’s inter- est in the topic to be exactly like mine. That spirit and focus is really about how to help entrepreneurs build great companies and drive real contributions to their customers and, ultimately, the world. Venture capital is the business that provides capital, advice, networks, and support to these entrepreneurs. And it has existed in various forms for cen- turies, or longer. Tarang’s approach has been to de-mystify the venture capital process for the benefit of entrepreneurs. And that’s why I wanted to contribute to his work. Since 1995, I have had the privilege to be in the venture business and back great entrepreneurs. It’s incredibly rewarding. Yes, the financial returns can be fantastic. Even more gratifying is the great personal pleasure in seeing great people you believe in create great new businesses and products for the world. And that’s why I am in this business and why I love it. As an entrepreneur and venture capitalist, I have personally noticed that entrepreneurs really want to understand how venture capitalists make decisions. Decisions on which founders to meet. Decisions on which founders to invest in and support. This incredibly gritty, real-life decision making is at the heart of the day-to-day operations of a venture capitalist. When I go through some of what makes venture firms work and how a venture capitalist makes decisions, entrepreneurs always remark how much it helped them to understand the venture business. I’ve seen entrepreneurs get frustrated and waste a lot of valuable time and resources because they don’t understand the role of the venture capitalist, before and after they get funded. Frequently, it takes repeat start-ups for founders to learn more of the context and content of the venture business and how venture capitalists can help them succeed. Tarang Shah’s book Venture Capitalists at Work is a foundational pillar in an entrepreneur’s understanding and resources. I am thrilled that Tarang has pulled together the viewpoints of varied, successful venture capitalists and

ix shown how they work. This is a first in terms of the level of detail, quality of discussion, and value to the entrepreneur. What is particularly useful for the founder are these conversations. The content is riveting and unrivaled in terms of its open, honest, and vulnerable exposure. It’s very clear to me that this content will help entrepreneurs find a venture capitalist that is a good match for them, and get funded. And it will help them efficiently and effectively work with that person and improve their chances of success. Entrepreneurs will clearly benefit from this book whether they are first-time or repeat entrepreneurs. And importantly, this will move entrepreneurship a huge leap forward. This is what humanity needs for economic progression, job creation, and the great products and services that serve the world. —George Zachary Charles River Ventures

x About the Authors

Tarang Shah is a venture capital pro- fessional. At SoftBank Capital, a venture capital fund, he assisted with $50 million worth of investments in mobile, digital media, and enterprise software start- ups. He has reviewed well over 1,000 start-up companies and has served as a board member and CEO advisor for more than a dozen of them. Tarang is the developer of a venture model, the Start-up Analysis Model (SAM), which assesses the success potential of start-ups. He is currently a technology innovation executive and mobile payment/commerce expert for one of the largest financial institu- tions in the United States, where he has built and now leads a start-up risk assessment practice based on his venture model. Tarang was a co-founder of Ariants, a VC consulting firm; the lead product manager for Ericsson’s first 3G product line, which invested $300 million in R&D; the business leader responsible for Ericsson’s CDMA450 product line; and a marketing manager for Qualcomm’s CDMA technology. Tarang has an MBA from the Thunderbird School of Global Management and an MBA and BSEE from Gujarat University in India. He passed CFA Level II in 2005. Sheetal Shah is a contributing author. She is an expert at analyzing Wall Street–listed public companies and translating that analysis methodology into a start-up analysis framework. Sheetal was a co-founder of Ariants, a VC consulting firm, and is the co- developer of the Start-up Analysis Model. Sheetal has a BS in bioscience from the University of California, Irvine. She passed CFA Level II in 2005.

xi Acknowledgments

Whether it is a great product, start-up, or a book, anything meaningful that touches many comes together when a remarkable team strokes together in great harmony with a common mission. I am proud of the fact that this book was made possible by the combined effort of more than 100 individuals, including interviewees, researchers, reviewers, a publishing team, and industry experts. We all were motivated by one common mission—to help entrepreneurs with knowledge gathered from some of the best investors and practitioners in the venture capital industry. These are people who have helped create over 70 game-changing success stories like YouTube, Groupon, Face- book, PayPal, Twitter, Bloom Energy, Zappos, LinkedIn, and many more. We all wanted to improve entrepreneurs’ chances of success by sharing what we have learned about how to and how not to build great companies. Nothing will be more satisfying than seeing this book positively influence the outcome of many start-ups and the hardworking, dedicated, persistent risk-takers behind them. I would like to thank Sheetal Shah, my wife and contributing author, for making this project a reality. She has relentlessly kept this project together and lifted it to new heights by helping me dream big, driving the project forward, and assisting with everything from content to format, selecting interviewees, the design and review of interview questions and interview chapters, and other innumerable aspects key to publishing a book. Most importantly, her belief in me through ups and downs, her incredible patience with my crazy ideas and schedules, and her guidance and motivation as a true friend and co- founder played a pivotal role in the success of this project. Our son Raj Shah’s arrival in this world was a true inspiration for this book. He brought with him a divine spark that motivated us to reach for our dreams. We are very appreciative of Raj for teaching us to do what’s joyful and seek joy in everything we do. We also owe thanks to Mukundray G Shah, Sheetal’s dad and my father-in-law, whose belief, encouragement, and ideas greatly inspired us as well. I feel grateful to the incredible group of interviewees who participated in this book. They genuinely believed in this project aimed at helping entrepreneurs.

xiii They joyfully dedicated their time and energy to review interview questions, participated in the interviews, went through various drafts of the chapters with incredible diligence, and made sure the lessons garnered from their years of successful venture building and investing are communicated to entrepreneurs. They were very patient and supportive of my ideas, questions, and how best to present their thoughts and experiences in this book. Their true love for entrepreneurship was evident in every step of this journey. It’s natural to have some of their magic dust sprinkle over you as you read this book. For this book project and also for Idea to Billion (our research project fo- cused on analyzing and testing the success criteria of 100 leading start-ups), we were fortunate to have research support from several MBA as well as management students from the leading graduate business schools, including Harvard, UC Berkeley, UCLA, Pepperdine University, the University of Southern California, and the University of California, Irvine. They conducted more than 100 research assignments, helping us look into every imaginable aspect of what creates successful start-ups. The four rock stars that I am especially thankful to are Sunil Dhuri of Harvard (no assignment is beyond his reach and capability), Ana Gonzalez of Harvard (for unbelievable depth and attention to detail), Holly Sixiao of Pepperdine (for amazing analysis of start-ups), and Jonathan Kroopf of Berkeley (for unmatched business acu- men and speed). This fantastic four’s dedication and contribution has played a key role in the success of this project. I would also like to thank the following individuals for their research contributions: Shaw Saw (Harvard), Matt Needel (Boston University), Monika Prasad (UCI), and Abhishek Tha- kur (UCLA). I am not sure if this project would have been possible without genuine motivation, guidance, and encouragement from my dear friends, including Avikk Ghose, who was the first to see why this could be a great idea; Gus Tai (Trin- ity Ventures) who made himself available for every question I had and to fill in critical gaps in the project; George Zachary (Charles River Ventures) for rec- ognizing the value of this project’s potential in helping entrepreneurs—and for leveraging his network to promote the project; and Randy Komisar (Kleiner Perkins), a venture capitalist and author, for always lending his helping hand and words of encouragement. I am also very thankful to Gus Tai and George Zachary for doing the honor of writing the forewords for this book. I am thankful to the legendary angel investor Ron Conway for endorsing this project. Ron, Gus, and George’s burning love for entrepreneurship has been very inspiring to me.

xiv I would like to thank the following individuals for their help with the review of the content and providing invaluable critique and guidance to make this book very relevant and useful to entrepreneurs: Tom Taulli (Taulli.com) for his incredible critical review and guidance as a business writer; Avikk Ghose for staying up many nights and weekends to make sure he got to review every word and sentence, and provide a start-up founder and corporate executive’s perspective; and Jonathan Kroopf for his critical review and sum- mary from a college entrepreneur and student’s perspective. I would also like to thank the following individuals for their help with editing and review: Amy Grady, Toby Prosky, TM Ravi, Kelly Dillon, Rachel Moore Weller, Jennifer Acree, Jeff Titterton, Trish Striglos, and Jane Barrett. My special thanks to Mark Dempster for his extraordinary help with editing and review. I would also like to thank following individuals for their support and for making key introductions for this project: Tom Burgess, Ted Alexander, George Zachary, Gus Tai, Avikk Ghose, Woosung Ahn, David Young, Prashant Shah, Rich Wong, Ron Bouganim, Jim Scheinman, Kevin Hartz, Joe Medved, Jonathan Katzman, Saeed Amidi, Amir Amidi, Kevin Baroumand, Patricia Nakache, Terry Moore, Toby Prosky, David Zilberman, Vish Mishra, Dan Murillo, Viney Sawhney, and Marc Averitt. Sheetal and I would like to convey our sincere thanks to our publishing team at Apress. Jeff Olson has been an incredible believer in this project from the moment he saw my book proposal. His diligent editing, focus on quality, and presentation style to help readers get maximum value out of the content of this book is second to none. Jessica Belanger has been tremendous force in running this project and taking care of every little detail to ensure its success. Jeff, Jessica, Kim Burton, Rita Fernando, and the production team have been extremely agile and supportive to accommodate the requirements of interviewees and authors while maintaining the successful conversational style of the At Work series. My special thanks go to my mentors and teachers who helped me in my journey in the venture capital industry and gave me foundation for attempt- ing this book. I would like to thank Tom Siegel and Peter Fisher (Shepherd Ventures), who encouraged me to consider a career in venture capital and helped me every step of the way. I would like to thank the SoftBank Capital team, including Ron Fisher, Eric Hippeau, Mike Perlis, Steve Murray, Jordan Levy, Craig Cooper, Ron Schreiber, Karin Klein, Cindy Sperling, Joe Medved, Dave Kimelberg, and Phil Shevin for teaching me venture investing and giving me tremendous exposure to the entire start-up investing process from deal sourcing to board participation and exit planning. I would like to convey my sincere thanks to all my VC colleagues who taught me a lot about the

xv venture business. Most importantly, I feel deep gratitude towards the start- up founders and teams that I had opportunity to interact with and learn from. Their passion, creativity, and relentless drive to bring new products and services to the market despite many odds have inspired me beyond imagination. Sheetal and I would like to thank our true teachers—our spiritual guru Pu- jyashri Gurudev Rakeshbhai Zhaveri and our parents—who taught us what’s most important in life: selfless love for humanity and leveraging our gifts and resources for betterment of the mankind. The purpose of souls is to assist each other.

xvi Introduction

For years, this question has played in our minds: why do some start-ups defy all odds and become multibillion-dollar successes while many others fail? Is this purely a stroke of luck or is there a science behind the success? If so, what are the common characteristics among successful start-ups and entrepreneurs? To find answers to these questions, we went straight to the source and asked the venture capital investors who were part of some of the most notable successes of our time. In this book, you will hear leading start-up investment practitioners discuss, in their own words, how they identify promising ideas, markets, products and entrepreneurs, and how they helped build game-changing companies. We explored with them the lessons learned from not only the successes, but also their failures, to identify the factors that separate the two groups and also to draw the common patterns. Finally, we asked them what advice they would give to entrepreneurs aspiring to build the next Google, Facebook, Groupon, or Twitter. To provide you with a 360-degree view of how to build successful start-ups, we have included interviews with several phenomenal entrepreneurs and ex- ceptional start-up operators. We explored with them the end-to-end journey from formation to exit and discussed the most common operating challenges along the way, and how they tackled them. As you’ll read in the pages to come, many interesting revelations and patterns emerged. One of the most surprising revelations was that many successful companies arose out of non-consensus, unconventional, and in fact contrarian ideas. Most people didn’t think those ideas would succeed at all, let alone become multibillion-dollar companies. In each of these cases, the entrepreneurs had a very strong intuition and access to asymmetric information based on their predisposition toward, and early exposure to, a potentially huge untapped or emerging market opportunity. Groupon, Twitter, and Facebook are great examples of that. Given the general market disbelief, these companies en- joyed very little competition until they broke off the chart. On the other

xvii hand, the riskiest start-up ideas tend to be those most people can see are great ideas. Hence, there is so much competition that it negatively impacts everything from gross margin to valuation. Surprisingly, most successful start-ups were not started with a goal to build a billion-dollar company. They rather started with a desire to solve a meaningful “pain point”—a VC term for a problem that causes people a lot of frustration. This is usually something that affects the entrepreneur personally and directly. Then the entrepreneur does a wonderful job of solving the problem for a small group of customers. Eventually the entrepreneur, with the help of venture investors, finds a way to expand the solution to a very large group of customers. This doesn’t necessarily put management before market, but rather it emphasizes the fact that the best companies are created when great teams intersect with large market opportunities. Whereas entrepreneurs focus on identifying and solving these burning pain points, venture investors try to find those extraordinary entrepreneurs who are trying to solve potentially huge problems in a meaningful way. Venture investors tap into their tremendous network of contacts and “pattern rec- ognition”—the art of leveraging lessons drawn from past successes and failures to identify a combination of factors and behaviors that may point to promising markets, entrepreneurs, products, business models, and so forth. Together, these build a “prepared mind” or “gut feel” about the emerging market opportunities created by the tectonic shifts in customer behavior and the enabling technologies that can be successfully applied to those shifts. Entrepreneurs are true visionaries, and venture investors are great pattern recognizers with an experienced toolkit of how to build companies—and how not to build them. Successful start-ups are created when a trusted rela- tionship and line of communication is established between the visionary (entrepreneur) and the pattern recognizer (investor) for two-way knowledge transfer. In discussing the characteristics of the successful founders, the words re- peated most often are extraordinary passion, intelligence, authenticity, intellectual honesty, dogged persistence, risk-taking, and integrity. Many of these entrepreneurs were scarred by past failures, were hungry to win big, or came from humble backgrounds. They also had this fact in common: they were hardly known to the world before starting companies that made them successful and famous. Most of these successful founders also paired with one or more co-founders rather than going solo. The co-founders they partnered with had not only complementary skills, but more importantly, a long history of working together. They had built a great chemistry with each other well before they became co-founders. xviii It’s also clear from the interviews that most successful start-ups have an “A” team of 30 to 40 people stroking together in harmony towards a common mission. This gives them ten times the productivity advantage over their competitors. These teams come together when the passion, intelligence, and charisma of the founders serve as a talent-magnet to attract some of the best people in the industry to solve the toughest and most challenging problems for their customers. The first 10 to 12 hires in the start-up team are extremely important, as they determine the DNA and culture of the company and, in turn, its success trajectory. It’s quite interesting to notice that successful start-ups are extremely adept at “rapid iteration and fast fail.” This technique of quickly trying things out is one of the most important characteristics of the “A” team and it becomes a core part of the start-up DNA. Successful start-ups use it to figure out a product/market fit and optimize everything from product features to pricing. Successful start-ups also end up making drastic changes to their original plans in what’s called a “pivot.” Only a small percentage of such pivots—one in ten—are successful, though. The successful pivot is a function of the “authenticity” and “intellectual honesty” of the entrepreneurs, where a deep knowledge of the market space and its fine nuances, combined with their ability to quickly adapt to new market realities, plays a key role in determining the ef- fective degree and direction of the pivot. The journey to a successful pivot has a logical progression without any leaps from one strategy to the next, and the domain knowledge of the founders remains relevant in the new plan. The interviews also reveal how important market timing is in determining start-up success. It’s probably the most overlooked concept by the entrepreneurs, and they usually end up being too early or too late to the market. Many companies fail not because they are too early or too late, but because they don’t recognize or admit that, and change their plans and cash burn accordingly. Equally revealing is the fact that the so-called “first mover” advantage is not that important for start-up success, unless you can turn that early position into a sustainable competitive lead. An example might be a consumer inter- net company that would leverage the network effect to build a massive and sticky user base—like Groupon. But usually a successful start-up might be coming to the party late, yet with a better solution and better execution of its strategy. Remember, Google was the 99th search engine to launch and Facebook launched a couple years after Friendster and LinkedIn. These findings are just the tip of the “knowledge iceberg” hidden in this book. We are confident that quite a lot of actionable insights will be revealed

xix to you as you read through various chapters. We have spent enough years in the venture industry to know some of the most pressing challenges faced by the budding entrepreneurs. We also know that there is an ocean of untapped knowledge hidden within the leading practitioners in this industry. This is our humble attempt to bring a few buckets of that knowledge to much-deserving entrepreneurs who can learn and apply these findings to their specific situations and improve their chances of building successful companies. Nothing will be more satisfying than seeing this book positively influence and lift the success trajectory of the entrepreneurs whose relentless passion, dedication, and dogged pursuit brings great products and services to us against all odds. They are a true blessing to the world economy and mankind. For the love of entrepreneurship!