Don’t Get Paralyzed by Perfection

Do you mentor anyone yourself now?

Yes, there are quite a few I'd say entrepreneurs in our portfolio that I spend a lot of time with, and that I really love you know, chatting with. There are ex-TaskRabbit employees that I've stayed in touch with. I just met with one yesterday actually who's thinking about starting her own company.

As you're mentoring all these folks, what would you say is the one or two most common pieces of advice you give them.

It really goes back to one- don't get paralyzed by perfection. Really figure out the things that you don't know how to do and figure out ways you can surround yourself with people that can help you. And it doesn't have to be perfect, but get something out there. Get the feedback, iterate on it and move forward. And that's really the number one piece of advice.

And I think the second piece of advice, and I just gave this advice yesterday, particularly now with my investor hat on is: I realized that there are many great ideas out there. Not all of these ideas need to be backed by venture capitalists. Venture capital is one way to capitalize a company. You can go out and raise money from VCs and that's one path, but there are lots of other paths that entrepreneurs can take to fund their companies, to fund their businesses. They can bootstrap them. They can raise small angel amounts of money from friends and family. Those businesses can be just as impactful and just as exciting, particularly if they're really passionate about what they're doing. And so I think I have this perspective now on venture being sort of a very tiny slice of the pie when we think holistically about entrepreneurship.