Risky Business!

So you've done plenty of reflecting and taken plenty of risks in your career, have there been any risks that you took that did not work out, and how did you deal with it?

Oh, yeah, I think in our business, in the investing business, you take risk every time you decide to make an investment. And so I've had my fair share of companies that didn't turn out the way that I wanted them to turn out, and you just deal with that. You learn what you did in those cases, what are the things that you overlooked, what are the things that you were too optimistic about? It's very easy in venture capital to get entrepreneur optimism, which is "we can do anything" and then you start getting emotionally connected with the opportunity instead of being objective. And sometimes you make investments in things that if you were more objective, if you were less caught up in the idea, that you might make a different decision. So there were a few of those and I consider those as failures, because I expect every company that I invest in to be massively successful. But what it proved to me was that, well, you can learn a lot, you can learn a lot from a failure. In fact, you learn probably a lot more from failure than you do from a success. And so then what you do with that learning will help, I think, inform how your career progresses past that point, because I took those learnings and I developed what I call pattern recognition or an attitude for what makes a company work, whereas, I feel very confident the investments that I do now and that my team does will have good outcomes. And we have examples of that, we invested in two companies, one called Pixeom and one called Aparato, both of which were acquired in under 12 months in our tenure here. So we've had our first two exits in less than 12 months.

Congratulations.

Yeah, yeah, so that skill, that practice actually does make a difference when it comes to being effective in your trade.