David Rosenthal: recommendation

Transcript context

…That’s wild. It’s so interesting. Venture capital falls under the broad asset class today of alternative investments, which always seems a little funny given how much—especially today with all late-stage money coming into startups—how much money is invested there. It’s silly to call it alternative. Now, when you look at it these days, you had to be a very alternative counter-culture person, to believe that this was the best way to go and invest your money. It's right at this moment in time that a—quite a maverick as one might say—individual, comes on the scene and basically single-handedly, writes the playbook of what modern venture capital and alongside it, what a modern startup would look like and that man's name is Don Valentine. Don, of course, goes on and starts Sequoia Capital and we're going to tell the story here. I cannot recommend highly enough, anyone, certainly if you work or are interested in venture, but even if you're not, if you're just interested in technology and startups, go do two things: (1) watch the Youtube video of a talk that Don gave at the GSB at Stanford in 2010 and (2) read this wonderful oral history that Berkeley did as part of the history department there with Don. You will get a sense for what an amazing character this guy is. A lot of the history of this show is taken from those two documents. Yeah. Listeners, the way to think about part one and part two of the Sequoia story, part one that we're going to focus on here, this is really Don’s story.…

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