What's the Big Idea?

摘要

I am a venture capitalist and have been for 27 years. Trained in nuclear engineering in the 1970s, I worked in that profession until 1988, when I joined Venrock, the private venture partnership of the Rockefeller family. Since then, I've learned a fair bit about entrepreneurship, risk taking, and how to build great companies. At Venrock, I led the financing of 53 innovative companies from their beginnings, including a 1991 investment in Spyglass, one of the very first Internet companies. Spyglass went public in 1994 and was acquired for $1.9 billion a few years later. Seven of my companies successfully completed initial public offerings, including Check Point Software, on whose board I still serve. Three dozen of the companies were successfully acquired at a profit to everyone involved. And the others-well, they are somewhere still in development, or didn't make it. When I was a managing partner at Venrock, the firm launched over 300 companies. Our earliest greatest hits included Intel and Apple, followed more recently by Check Point, DoubleClick, Gilead Sciences, Imperva, Athena Health, Vontu, Anacor, and CloudFlare.