I have never been a fan of venture capital, especially "well educated, well-heeled" venture capitalists. There is a genuine axis of evil consisting of venture capitalists, investment bankers, "elite" b-schools, and pension fund managers who monopolize resources, platforms and bandwidth to the detriment of real innovators and entrepreneurs. So I found the following from Guy Kawasaki full of irony:
I am a third-generation Japanese American. My family moved here to drive a taxi and clean white people’s homes. If I had a choice between funding someone from a family who moved here from Vietnam whose father and mother run a 7-Eleven versus a descendant of a Mayflower passenger with “IV” in his name, I’ll give you half a guess as to my preference. You need to encourage smart, hungry, and aggressive people to immigrate from around the world. And to do that, you need good schools. To mix several metaphors, if you want to cover your ass, you need to open your kimono because trust-fund kids don’t make good entrepreneurs.
The irony in Guy's statement is that the vast majority of VC's are the guys with IV in their name, and the vast majority of investments are made in guys with IV in their name (or the equivalent Stanford/Harvard MBA). What Guy and his VC brethren continue to miss, are the millions of smart, hungry, and aggressive unhyphenated and undenominated Americans living in places like Iowa, Illinois and Michigan. Having said that, I do think that Guy is probably one of the few top tier VC's who will genuinely reach beyond the normal Silicon Valley deal. Any VC who plays hockey at lunch can't be all bad.
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