10 years ago I concluded the most intense learning period of my career as a junior member of the investing team at Khosla Ventures. I spent the last 9 months distilling what I learned over that period into a 9-part curriculum, replete with exhaustive references and resources.
The biggest takeaway was that there isn’t one specific skill you need to learn to be a good VC investor, or a book that will unlock success, or a way of thinking. Success is a mindset made manifest in behavior, in actual outcomes — and success, as a general concept, has no formula.
VC has a very specific way of seeing the world. It’s a specialized and relentlessly competitive game to play — but it’s not the only one. VC gets a lot of attention because of the headlines startups generate (lottery-like outcomes, hero’s journey, etc.), but the biggest mistake people make about it — both as investors and founders — is to define success through its lens. As a founder, there are lots of ways to build a successful business that don’t necessarily involve raising VC. As an investor, VC is a niche category in the world of asset management — and its average returns aren’t great.
If all you do is copy what others before you have done — even legendary VCs and founders — at best you’ll be a lossy imitation of them, yielding inferior results. The best practices of your predecessors are a commodity.
Success is inherently idiosyncratic. There’s no playbook for achieving it: to be successful is to be sui generis. That’s the only common feature. To paraphrase Tolstoy, each successful person is successful in their own way.
In some ways, too strong a desire to read books or learn about others’ experiences is itself a trap: the answer to “how do I become successful“ is not to be found out there. That very attachment can be a symptom of your problem: you don’t trust yourself, or don’t know yourself, and are looking for someone to tell you what to do.
As Marc Andreessen would put it: introspection is overrated.
By all means, read books and learn about others’ experiences if that’s something you genuinely feel called to do. Only you know your real motives. But don’t for one moment think those accounts contain a secret map that you can decipher with enough effort. The one thing no book can teach you is how to chart your own course. If it did, it would turn into the very thing it’s warning you away from, yet another totem supplanting the actual practice.
Success is about finding and defining your own game, the one you are uniquely suited to play. No one can tell you what that is and it’s not discovered with the thinking mind.
These are the breadcrumbs. The rest of the journey is yours alone.