Brad Gerstner: evaluation

Transcript context

…If they're at the stage where they're actually taking money from a venture capitalist, they have a term sheet, and that's going to happen for them, the personal risk there is extremely low. There's no risk. What risk are you talking about? The risk is have a young family mortgage your house, mortgage your car, double digit interest rates and inflation. The business goes under. My dad loses his health, he loses his house, he loses his marriage. That's risk. The beautiful thing about this country is we have created a system where we encourage risk takers. Unfortunately, in 1980 in the middle part of the country in a small town, my dad refused to declare bankruptcy. He would work the rest of his life trying to pay back that money because it was his word that he gave to the people who lent him the money. I think about that when I hear from entrepreneurs or when I even think about the risk associated with starting Altimeter or starting the other companies I started, it's really not a risk relative to the risk he undertook. I grew up around an entrepreneur, but it was not a heroic entrepreneurial story. My grandfather, my father's father, basically forbade us from becoming entrepreneurs. He said to the four grandchildren, you can become professionals, doctors, lawyers, architects, but please don't become entrepreneurs. I felt like I owed that to him, even though I felt I was always kind of starting little enterprises in high school and thinking that way my brother did in college, but I went to law school. And you thought you were going to go into politics and be a leader in government. How far did you get on that path?…

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