For those of you missed out the VC Movie Night during Entrepreneurs Week, here's your chance to catch up! Many thanks to Brendan Lewis from The Churchill Club for taking his time digging out all the gold from the one hour footage. Even for those of us already watched the video at the movie night, if you haven't taken enough notes (like myself) this is an excellent summary of the many insights about tech startups and VCs that came out of the video.

The movie was a never before seen series of interviews with the Principals of Draper Fisher Jurvetson taken in late 2005, courtesy of Bill Lang International. DFJ is one of the biggest Venture Capital firms. Based on the West Coast of the USA, it was formed in 1985, has assets of over $4.5B, has affiliate offices in 30 cities. The firm has funded well-known technology companies including Hotmail (acquired by Microsoft), Overture (acquired by Yahoo), Skype (acquired by eBay) and Glam Media. Other notable investments include SugarCRM, Technorati, Interwoven, Meebo and Baidu among others.

The 3 principals, Tim Draper, John Fisher and Steve Jurvetson spoke and covered a number of varied topics.

I have copied the section "The Entrepreneur" from the original post below. To read more about topics such as "Venture Capital as a Career" and commentary on past DFJs deals, be sure to click here.

The Entrepreneur

Steve Jurvetson had worked with Steve Jobs at Apple. He described Steve Jobs as an extreme form of the charismatic leader and a reference point for other entrepreneurs. Jobs has a vision and is not easily swayed from it (despite this sometimes being bad). Consequently he has an employee base that operates with a missionary like zeal. Pragmatic steps are taken to reach the vision with enormous speed, such as hiring and firing multiple VPs of Marketing over the course of a summer.

They felt that Entrepreneurs they wanted to fund:

* Had a very clear vision of the future
* Were exceedingly bright
* Were spectacularly energetic
* Were absolutely fearless
* And driven with an unusual passion

They also noted that youth and inexperience weren't a barrier to success. Young founders were the norm with global success stories:
Microsoft - 19
Dell - 19
Apple - 21
Yahopo - 26ish
Google - 25
Sun - 26-27
Cisco - late 20s
Amazon - 29-30
Because youth has passion, drive, energy and is not tainted by conventional wisdom.

They look for entrepreneurs that want to change the world for the better.

It was also noted that traditionally there has been a flood of consultants and bankers to entrepreneurship during boom times. They felt this was okay for ICT during the dot com boom - but can't happen for science based areas : Life Sciences, Nanotech, Space etc because the knowledge barriers are too high. Therefore in these particular areas the technology has a much higher weighting when considering making a deal and the value of management is devalued somewhat.

It was also considered that a great engineer or scientist is extremely unlikely to make a great entrepreneur as the skills required to be great sat at opposite ends of a spectrum. Instead they recommended that technologist partnered up and concentrated of developing a deep level of respect for their commercial “other halves” rather than trying to be the entrepreneur. This strategy appears to happen all too often in global success stories and in fact they felt that this “dynamic duo” arrangement was worthy of study by the business schools.

Click here to read the full article.

Feel pumped after reading this article? Kick start your next entrepreneurial endeavor at the upcoming IdeaPitch 2009!

Posted by Tian @ 5.24pm, 10/09/09