From the perspective of an operations guy, there is a lot of riff-raff in venture capital: posers, herd mentality, technology infatuation, too much education, not enough experience to appreciate what grit and focus it takes to grow a business out of nothing. To have a fighting chance, you want to be with the best firms, and the best partners in tho

Sam had no talent for coding—the two closest friends he’d made at MIT were both coders, but he still couldn’t tell a good coder from a bad coder. About trading all he knew was that he was not obviously unqualified to do it. He dropped his résumé with the firms looking for traders. It still felt like a lark. “Someone told me that a lot of physics ma

Entrepreneurs in the expertise business — when faced with a money problem — just make more money rather than looking for efficiencies. Entrepreneurial experts are notoriously terrible at efficiency and cost control.