My book, Mastering the VC Game, is going to be coming out in paperback. My publisher, Penguin's business imprint Portfoilo, has asked me to make some edits and updates for the new edition, which I have been dutifully working on.
For fun, I experimented with getting some community input on this task. I posed a question on the popular Q&A site Quora: "What should I tweak in my book, Mastering the VC Game, for the upcoming paperback edition?" and got some great responses. It is yet another example of how rich the discouse now is in the blogosphere on the start-up ecosystem. I am working on each of them, as well as other feedback I've gotten from reviewers. By the way, if you want to read some of the book for free, I have made the first 40 pages available here.
One thing I was struck by was that the start-ups I chose to profile in 2009 have absolutely exploded in popularity and value. Baidu was worth $12 billion at the time of the writing. It is now $41 billion. Constant Contact, LinkedIn, Twitter and Zynga were other companies I profiled. Each of them has grown in value from 2-10x since the time of the writing a short eighteen months ago. I don't know if it makes the lessons from these founders captured in the book that much more valuable. I think we sometimes need to spend more time studying the lessons learned from start-up failures and perhaps this is something I will devote more energy to in the months ahead.
So, stay tuned for news about when the new release will be coming out. In the meantime, I'm sharing this funny cartoon that Andy Cook of Rentabilities was kind enough to have drawn up and sent to me. It brings to life the concept of "putting money to work" that I tweak VCs for in the book. The only thing I don't like about the cartoon is that the VC is wearing a tie - very unrealistic nowadays...
