The Key to Venture Investing, It’s Personal

In busi­ness, and def­i­nitely in life, it’s always been about who knows, likes, and trust you. Andrew Har­gadon has writ­ten an excel­lent piece that exam­ines (via Ben Horowitz ), the invest­ing frame­work of Ron Con­way one of the Sil­i­con Valley’s uber angels.

Key points:

• Social cap­i­tal (con­nec­tions) are often more impor­tant than finan­cial cap­i­tal (cash) to startups.
• Cash can bring find con­nec­tions, but they might not be the right peo­ple or have the right reasons.
• Pub­lic agen­cies have the poten­tial to play a sig­nif­i­cant role if they would har­ness the power of their broad rang­ing net­works and focus it on nur­tur­ing emerg­ing concerns.

Why do I think that this war­rants your atten­tion? Because busi­ness rela­tion­ships are per­sonal rela­tion­ships. As we go about build­ing, or reviv­ing stalled, strate­gic ini­tia­tives we need to be sure to incor­po­rate into the busi­ness model both the cre­ation of and focused use of social capital.

Upon the relaunch of my multi-decade ven­ture com­monly referred to as me, myself, and I — see Mitch Joel’s piece ‘CRTL-ALT-DEL’ or Chris Brogan’s series on redrawl­ing his work­flow — I’ve been for­tu­nate enough to be a mem­ber of the found­ing class of Keith Fezzazi’s Rela­tion­ship Man­age­ment Acad­emy (RMA). The ben­e­fit, learn­ing the rules behind a proven sys­tem that’s focused on build­ing your ulti­mate net­work — empha­sis on a net­work that is right for you.

I want to pub­lic thank Tim Kastelle for bring­ing Andrew Hargadon’s blog to my atten­tion. Tim is a mem­ber of the Tech­nol­ogy & Inno­va­tion Man­age­ment Cen­tre in the School of Busi­ness at the Uni­ver­sity of Queens­land, his work is some­thing that you def­i­nitely need to keep on your radar screen.

Posted via email from donaldmcmichael’s pos­ter­ous