Book of the Week: The Monk and the Riddle
05 Mar 2015
This week I read The Monk and the Riddle, by Randy Komisar, who works for a VC firm currently being sued by Ellen Pao for gender discrimination. The book is a little unusual, but I liked it. It’s fiction interspersed with Randy’s life and experiences as a VC. There is an overarching story of a caricatured guy trying to raise money for funerals.com and he takes side tangents to go into his background and experiences. Deferred Life Plan
Step one: Do what you have to do Then, eventually— Step two: Do what you want to do.
The main point of the book is if you’re going to start a company, you need to do it because that is what you want to do, not what you have to do to make money in order to do what you want to do. Passion vs. Drive
Passion pulls you toward something you cannot resist. Drive pushes you toward something you feel compelled or obligated to do. If you know nothing about yourself, you can’t tell the difference.
Passion and drive are different. Sometimes people confuse them. People use drive to get through step one of the deferred life plan and hope to find passion in step two. 3 CEOs
- Retriever - assembles core team, product, service and market direction around a coherent vision. raises money and secures early customers and partners
- Bloodhound - find market, prove business. build operating team and establish market beachhead.
- Husky - lead and scale
As a startup goes through different stages, it needs a CEO with different traits. This is why sometimes the founder will step down. People need to stop living the deferred life plan. When you’re raising money from a VC, you need to go big and not tell the VC what you think they want to hear.