VENTURE CAPITAL IS FUNDAMENTALLY a service business. Success in the venture business requires hustle, wisdom, judgment, hard work, and some luck. The venture capitalists I admire most love to spend their time and effort building real businesses. They always have a strong understanding of finance, but for them, finance is an enabler of what they most love to do. The right financial structure does not mean anything if all it does is guarantee a high percentage of nothing. One way to look at venture capital investing is as a stool with three legs: people, markets, and product innovation. All three legs are essential for success, but different venture capitalists put different emphasis on different legs at different times. A successful business is a result of success happening in many dimensions and feeding back on itself. Talented and hardworking people, customer traction, partners, brand value, and money all attract more of each other and, under the right conditions, can be scaled in nonlinear ways to allow a startup to become one of the small number of successes that drive the venture capital industry’s financial returns each year. The venture capitalist’s job is to be an important hub that helps enable this phenomenon to happen. After reading this book, I hope you now understand that implementing these ideas is more of an art than a science. Never stop learning.