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When eBay, a small Internet auction company based in San Jose, California, sought venture capital, it had to pass an informal test administered by the venture guys before they would consider making an investment: Was there a reasonably good likelihood that the investors could make ten times their money within three years? In

The law firm that we used, Gunderson Dettmer, will basically not take payment until you get funding. Silicon Valley is that way; everything is geared toward getting you started, and then you pay.

Perhaps more important than the venture firm itself is the specific partner that leads the investment—because, almost always, the partner who leads the round will join the startup’s board of directors. “We have always, always, always solved for the person joining the board,” Michelle Zatlyn, the co-founder of Cloudflare, told me. “It didn’t matter

You can’t understand personal computing and the techno-economic transition it brought about if you don’t keep in mind that it was all about radical entrepreneurs sealing an alliance with returns-hungry venture capitalists.

I’m forty-five years old at the time I’m writing this and I plan on doing five more years of angel investing—I’m on a ten-year plan. Another two hundred bets and I’m done—then it’s your turn. By the time I’m done with my ten-year plan, I will have invested in 350 startups and my goal is to return $250 million on $25 million deployed—I’m exactly hal