Another VC Quits: Will Price
March 13, 2008
Last week I wrote a post titled, “Venture Capital’s Brain Drain” where I suggested that more than 25% of venture capital partners I knew were quitting the VC business. Mike Arrington has the scoop on Will Price’s departure from Hummer Winblad. Price explains his decision:
“For those of you who read my blog
, you know that I am passionate about the venture capital industry and its importance in supporting innovation and entrepreneurship. As a General Partner at Hummer Winblad, I enjoyed the exposure and access to some of the key innovators and drivers of the new economy; company’s like Omniture, Move Networks, Mulesource, Widgetbox, and many others. At 36, however, I felt a persisting and important pull to embark on a new journey of growth, discovery, and learning. In my career to date, I have found that if you follow your heart, work tirelessly, and fish in good waters, good things will happen. For Widgetbox and our colleagues in the space, good things will continue to happen if we stay true to the web’s architecture of openness, distribution, and standardization and to users’ passion for empowerment, expression, and need for community.”
Will’s story is much like that of those of more than twenty venture capital partners I have talked to over the last few weeks. From my March 10th post:
Local VC departures include Guy Hoffman who left TL Ventures a while back and is now running a startup called USHomeTeam, Ram Velidi who is leaving Sevin Rosen and looking for opportuntities and Ed Olkkola from Austin Ventures who is now running Belo Interactive’s business development efforts. What is going on? The reason is simple, more and more venture capital firms are moving into private equity ~ big, complex deals that require lots of money and even more analysis. Guys like Guy, Ed and Ram who are good at working with startups aren’t interested in the number crunching private equity requires. Their ’soft skills’ and high EQ (emotional IQ) that produces 10x returns in venture capital, isn’t as useful in the private equity realm.
The most interesting aspect of this trend is the fact that so many really smart people are now available to join startups. Venture capital’s ‘brain-drain’ offers entrepreneurs a treasure trove of former VC partners interested in helping them execute on their ideas. Bringing on someone like Ram could offer a startup a ‘jump start’ that could mean the difference between failure and success.
