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Paul Buchheit: The future of venture capital and high-tech entrepreneurship

73 points| juiceandjuice | 14 years ago |stanford.edu | reply

13 comments

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[+] sdpurtill|14 years ago|reply
Great talk. Favorite quote so far: "The thing that we've noticed is that the longer you spend at a big company, the worse of an entrepreneur you are."
[+] aswanson|14 years ago|reply
Yeah, I think staying at a big company is a proxy for a few things that can work against entrepreneurship: risk aversion, used to "playing a role", divorce of your daily thinking from the marketplace... It's like at BigCo you become a specialized, mature cell. Startups require stem cells, ready to adapt into whatever the market requires.
[+] rmATinnovafy|14 years ago|reply
Quite profound. Companies seem to thrive on sould crunching. My own experience leads me to believe so.

But would the inverse also hold true? Is unemployment a fuel to entrepreneurship? The longer you are unemployed or under employed leads to one just going for it?

[+] architgupta|14 years ago|reply
The part about being holed up in an apartment resonated with me. I worked for a startup in the valley and then moved to India to start a new company. So being in a place where running a tech company is not the default is a lot of friction!

Its talks and videos which help I think.

[+] hongquan|14 years ago|reply
This was such a great talk. The best comment was from the Professor when someone in the audience asked about being a single founder.
[+] anamax|14 years ago|reply
Thanks but I wish that I had come up with a nicer way to say it. (And, I'm not a professor - I'm officially a part-time lecturer but I really just introduce speakers.)

Perhaps "There's nothing wrong with working on something for a long time but real founders ship".