I mentioned in my last post that I decided to write a book about venture capital and entrepreneurship, which is coming out next month (see http://bit.ly/mstrVC). In this post, I wanted to answer the question: "Who did you interview?"
Selecting interviewees was a tricky process. The purpose of the book is to be a helpful guide for entrepreneurs as they navigate the process of building their companies in partnership with VCs, so I wanted to capture the voices and insights of both entrepreneurs and VCs. In particular, I wanted to capture a diverse group - diversity in terms of geography, industry focus, gender and age. Here's who I ended up with:
Entrepreneurs:
- Tim Bucher (Zing, WebTV)
- Jack Dorsey (Square, Twitter)
- Gail Goodman (Constant Contact, Open Market)
- Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn, PayPal)
- Robert Langer (> 20 start-ups, including MicroCHIPs, T2, Predictive Bio)
- Marsha Moses (Predictive BioSciences)
- Eric Paley (Brontes)
- Mark Pincus (Zynga, Tribe, SupportSoft)
- Christoph Westphal (Sirtris, Alnylam, Momenta)
Venture Capitalists I interviewed were:
- Tim Draper (DFJ)
- Irena Goldenberg (Highland Europe)
- David Hornik (August)
- Terry McGuire (Polaris)
- Howard Morgan (First Round)
- Patricia Nakache (Trinity Ventures)
- Henry Nguyen (IDG Ventures Vietnam)
- Fred Wilson (Union Squrare)
- Quan Zhou (IDG-Accel China)
Interestingly, three of these entrepreneurs became VCs after I completed the interviews (Hoffman/Greylock, Paley/Founder Collective, Westphal/Longwood).
So what do folks think? I know I missed tens, if not hundreds, of other great people. I emphasized people who were currently active in the business rather than historical figures, but tried to include folks with decades of tenure and perspective alongside younger voices. I do regret not having more international entrepreneurs to compliment the three international VCs. Perhaps next edition?!
In my next blog post, I'll talk about the outline of the material the book covers and the different approach I am taking (with the support of Penguin) to making the content broadly available.
