My honest take on the matter is that it is a 100% relationship based industry. Having a computer science background is a huge advantage because finance is a complex quantitative system, but if you're not a passionate student of the qualitative realities it reflects, you won't go as far. I'm still not sure which side I like better.Īnd if you want to get into another area of finance, do it based on an area you're fascinated by and want to learn everything about - and go read 10 books and form strong opinions and start talking to people in the field. Once you learn from that experience you might want to do it again or you might feel you have the network credibility and skills to help a great VC.
Which means first build a skillset in an area you're passionate about that complements your computer science skill (design, marketing, product, communication, etc.) and learn to be a great leader and get involved with the most talented people you can find who are working on a mission you believe in where you know you can play a great role. So if you want to be a great VC, first be a great founder or operator. There are historically great VCs who have never helped run a top company and learned in some other way, but that's a rare exception. In particular, I'm always struck by how people who haven't helped run a hypergrowth tech company are convinced the one they are involved with is uniquely broken, and tend to have the wrong ideas about what to fix or focus on - needless to say an entrepreneur wouldn't want this type of person as an investor with control on a board. that lots of people like Ben Horowitz have written about well. I think this is because startups are very unintuitive - they always feel broken or out of control in certain ways especially as they scale fast - and require a lot of unique management, structuring, etc. The very best VCs especially in this new generation have mostly either founded very successful companies or operated as a leading exec at the top hyper growth companies. Venture Capital I'd argue is very different - yes you are managing money but in many respects it is closer to the science of entrepreneurship and understanding startup operations and scale, than it is to other parts of finance like global macro. In essence one could say I had by coincidence been studying for global macro for several years along with my interest in computer science. My middle brother got me reading a lot of economics and history at a young age, starting with Austrian Economics, and I developed lot of strong opinions, so global macro was a natural fit. Most people I know who are really successful in an area of finance didn't start down the path only to make money - usually they were really intellectually interested in some aspect of the world that was reflected in or managed by finance. Here's what a very wise Jon Lonsdale once told me, although this relates more to technology than the oil & gas sector:
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