The Secret of Success

Thursday, December 01, 2005http://whohastimeforthis.blogspot.com/
The Secret of Success
Commenters on my previous post have correctly pointed out that a logic puzzle is probably a weak indicator of VC skills. So what is a strong indicator of success? The question reminded me of an encounter in 1990...

The first person I ever met from Bessemer was Neill Brownstein, one of Silicon Valley's pioneer venture capitalists (with investments like Ungermann Bass, Telenet, Maxim, Veritas and BusinessLand). At that interview, he asked me this question:

What do you think is the most common trait among successful venture capitalists?

I thought hard, trying to impress him. "Deep industry domain knowledge."

"No," he said.

"Um, analytical skills?"

"No."

Uh oh, I started grasping. "Rich network of contacts? Operating experience? Engineering background? Financial background? Skepticism? Patience? Sense of Urgency? Salesmanship? Decisiveness?" (the last of which I clearly didn't display)

"No."

"I give up. What is it?"

"Luck."

I have since followed Neill's advice.

Coincidentally, the second most important factor, I now believe, is a strong, stable platform with great mentors (like Neill and Felda) and smart partners.

BBC E-mail: Role model overcoming hardships

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----- Original Message -----
From: "Syeda Jebeen S . Shah" Subject: BBC E-mail: Role model overcoming
hardships

Syeda Jebeen S. Shah saw this story on BBC News Online and thought you
should see it.

** Message **
I thought of sharing this with you all.

** Role model overcoming hardships **
Debabani Majumdar reports on the Bihar girl flown to London to address a
Unicef conference.
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/1/hi/world/south_asia/4530792.stm >

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DISK WIZARD,BAD SECTOR REMOVAL FROM SEAGATE HARD DRIVE

Why would I want to Zero Fill my drive?

The most common reasons to Zero Fill an ATA (IDE) hard drive are:

1. The drive has contracted a virus that cannot be removed without destroying the boot sector.
   
   
2. You are changing from one operating system to another and wish to remove everything from the drive.

The download routine for DiscWizard Starter Edition creates a bootable diskette. Boot from the diskette to start DiscWizard Starter Edition. After startup, select Utilities | Zero Fill Drive (Quick) or Zero Fill Drive (Full). Select the drive you want to erase, then select Zero Fill or Low Level.

Zero Fill Drive (Quick) will write over the beginning of the drive which includes the critical partition information, eliminating all partitions and information on the drive including the Master boot record. This is useful if you have a drive that has a corrupted partition or that you wish to erase to reinstalll a fresh operating system and new data.

Zero Fill Drive (Full) will write over the entire data area of the drive. This is useful if a drive has bad sectors that cannot be fixed by the operating system. This will also erase all the data on the drive, but it will take several hours.

When the process completes, reboot the system from the operating system install CD and follow the instructions to prepare (partition and format) the drive and install the operating system.
http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/disc/faq/ata_llfmt_what.html

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