During this week in the Riviera Maya (Mexico) I have read "Valley Boy", the autobiography of Tom Perkins, the flamboyant Silicon Valley pioneer and visionary. He is the founder of Kleiner Perkins and early investor in Tandem Computers, Genentech, AOL, Amazon, Netscape or Google, to name a few. He is also the owner of the world's largest sailing yacht.
Some interesting quotes:
- "Typically, the entrepreneurs will say at the beginning something along the lines of:"If I am not the right person to carry this company all the way to huge success, I'll be the first to recognize it, and I will step aside right away.=". Of course, they don't mean a word of it"
- "After decades of dealing with investment bankers, I find them to be exceptionally short-term oriented; their focus is entirely on the transaction of that instant and their specific fee for that transaction. They have all the self-restraing of lobotomized sharks"
- "The terms investment banker is marvelously misleading. Even the greatest firms on Wall Street have little to do with investments, and even less to do with banking, in the marketing of an IPO. The term fee-charging middlemen is clearly less attractive, but it's much closer fo an accurate description of their actual function"
- "K&P needed ventures! When you have a fund, there is pressure to invest; it is embarrassing to report the lack of progress each quarter to the lmited partners"
- "K&P has never financed any plan that arrived through the mail. If the entrepreneur can't figure out some personal approach, it's just too hopeless to consider"
- "Dave (founder of HP) was a natural leader, an entrepreneur who always seemed to know what to do next, who maybe had a grand strategy, or maybe not."
- "After getting a company started and through the first phase of growth, the heavy lifting was by no means over. The level of problems seems to keep pace with the growth of the company. It's a bit like the adage "LIttle kids, little problems; big kids, big problems""
- "I have been asked numerous times, "How do you write a successful business plan?" I typically answer, "I can't tell you how to write one, I can only tell you how we read one. We start at the back, and if the numbers are big, we look at the frong to see what kind of business it is. "
He writes about different aspects of his life, as his marriage with Danielle Steel (the best selling author in the world) or his passion for ocean racing.
Btw, I am back from Mexico!
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