

How what I do helps make the world a better place - mikeland86
http://www.storylane.com/stories/show/1100738776/how-what-i-do-helps-make-the-world-a-better-place

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amorphid
Entrepreneurs don't NEED VCs, but a VC can't do anything without entrepreneurs
seeking investment.

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SapphireSun
Some percentage of entrepreneurs get funded, some percentage of those actually
make it. You need both, but there are fewer VCs than entrepreneurs. Therefore
VCs have more reach even though they don't directly effect change. The
potential of the change that happens is driven by the entrepreneurs of course.
Trying to fit that into a "who's more important" hierarchy is just wanking.
Reality doesn't fit in such a simple model.

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crabasa
You misunderstand the question posed: who has more power? For instance, all
entrepreneurs need customers, but not all customers need entrepreneurs. So,
customers have more power to change the world? Of course not.

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majormajor
Well, in aggregate, yes, the customer's have the most power to change the
world. The world can't change without people driving the change. A new
company's success is directly tied to how many customers need what the company
is selling.

Customers have the power to buy a solution. VCs have the power to fund a
solution. An entrepreneur figures out what customers need and a way to provide
that. And at the same time, also figures out how to get this venture funded.
It's their position at the intersection, connecting the otherwise-unconnected
dots, that gives them the power to really make something big happen.

EDIT: perhaps a better way of expressing what I'm trying to say is that taking
the step to become an entrepreneur after seeing a problem is the most direct
way to try to actually change the status quo and fix that problem.

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siculars
Entrepreneurs, duh. There are lots of ways to get money.

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crabasa
My goodness, a VC has never, not once, changed the world. Unless they were an
entrepreneur first.

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nostrademons
That's a massive oversimplification that ignores that everyone who _has_
changed the world had lots of help doing it.

Larry and Sergey changed the world. I suspect that their path was
significantly easier because they had help from Andy Bechtolsheim, John Doerr,
and Michael Moritz - to say nothing of Craig Silverstein, Urs Hoezle, Amit
Patel, Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Paul Buchheit, Marissa Mayer, and the
hundreds of other early Google employees.

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snogglethorpe
Sure, but ...

I think the main differentiator is the degree to which the help is _generic_
—if person X could have been easily replaced by hundreds of others, X was
probably not all that crucial to changing-the-world-process-Y even if they
provided a great deal of assistance to Y.

For instance, the people who made the food Larry and Sergey ate while hacking
late all those nights, had a very direct effect on the creation of Google:
they _kept the creators alive!_ But food providers are easily replaceable
(cold as that sounds) in most cases, so it seems a little bit silly to say
that the delivery guy for Sergey's favorite chinese takeout "changed the
world."

So when it comes to VCs, it seems the relevant question is: absent a given VC,
how easily could the entrepreneur secure funding elsewhere? A very, very,
risky project that requires _tons_ of money may indeed have an extremely
difficult time raising enough funding, in which case the role of a VC that
"takes the leap" is much more crucial than it might be otherwise. In other
cases, VCs may be more akin to interchangeable service providers.

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nostrademons
So, then you get into the question of how replaceable the founders are. For
Google that's probably "not much", since there were some pretty big intuitive
leaps that were non-obvious when they came out. Even then, however - a lot of
people I know say that the inflection point in Google's success was when they
hired Urs Hoezle as employee #9, because he had been through the process of
architecting a massively-complex system before (he founded the startup that
eventually became Java's HotSpot compiler).

But for Facebook - millions of programmers could have written Facebook as it
existed in 2004. Mark Zuckerburg did, and he got the billions.

And Twitter - millions of programmers could have written Twitter as it existed
in 2006. Jack Dorsey did, and he gets the reputation (and the paper billions).

And Instagram - millions of programmers could write Instagram. Kevin Systrom
did. And he happened to know Adam D'Angelo, who introduced him to Marc
Andreesen. Who was the critical link in the chain? Kevin, Adam, or Marc?

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Datonomics
"An entrepreneur is an enterprising individual who builds capital through risk
and/or initiative." According to this definition, a VC is an entrepreneur. If
that is the case, then it would seem entrepreneurs would have more power to
change the world as VC's are a subset of entrepreneurs. :)

