Table of Contents
DAMIR PERGE
ENTREPRENEUR
MYTHS
FORGET BUSINESS SCHOOL
GET A $50 MILLION EDUCATION FROM A STARTUP VENTURE CAPITALIST
Edited by Jana Arnold
AN ENTREPRENEURDEX BOOK
ENTREPRENEURDEX · DALLAS
entrepreneurdex
Publishers since 2011
Copyright ©2011 by Damir Perge
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Perge, Damir
Entrepreneur Myths: Forget Business School /
Damir Perge – 1
st
ed.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
(1) Business (2) Entrepreneurship (3) Management (4) Investing (5) Capitalism
ISBN 978-1-61061-244-9
Entrepreneur Myths books are available for special promotions and premiums. For details, contact: Director, business development, entrepreneurdex, info@entrepreneurdex.com
First published in digital format in 2011
entrepreneurdex Edition – 2011
Cover design by Chiko StatChimp
Cover photography by © Andreirybachuk | Dreamstime.com
WARNING: THIS IS THE UNCENSORED VERSION OF ENTREPRENEUR MYTHS, FOR CENSORED VERSION PLEASE SEARCH FOR THE FOLLOWING ISBN: 978-1-61061-604-1
For my parents, Mira and Ivan Perge, for having the courage to leave Yugoslavia and enable me the opportunity to become a capitalist
To my children, with love: Coby, Michael, Jon, Paige and Isaac
Introduction
Shit, I truly wish I’d had this book when I started out as an entrepreneur after dropping of out college my senior year.
Entrepreneur Myths
is for anyone who wants to become an entrepreneur, or is already an entrepreneur. Whatever your age or experience — there’s something you can learn based on my investing $50 million into startups.
After you read this book, I hope you’ll feel you got a $50 million MBA — avoiding the bullshit I went through. First, let me tell you an old, but true story.
IBM chief Thomas Watson was once asked whether he planned to fire an employee who made a mistake that cost the company more than half a million dollars. Watson shook his head, "I just spent six hundred thousand dollars training him. Why would I want anyone else to hire his experience?"
I spent close to $50 million investing into over 25 startups by applying the principles of complexity science. I founded the Tesla Capital venture fund and named it after the great Nikola Tesla. We managed the seed fund somewhat like a combination of Y Combinator and 500 Startups (before those two companies were in existence), but the process, principles and methods were different — we operated at a higher velocity with larger chunks of money. My partner in Tesla Capital committed to $100 million in funding, then came in $50 million short. It was a major clusterfuck. Obviously I learned not to make investment decisions based on
committed
capital but on
actual
capital in the bank.
I still believe in the power of applying complexity science to early-stage investing. And I plan to do it again under the entrepreneurdex business model — a venturcelerator. I coined the term “venturcelerator” for a different kind of combination of incubator and accelerator — a company using complexity science to fund and launch startups. Nothing teaches you like real-time, hands-on experience.
Watson was right. Why would he fire someone who just got a $600,000 education? The same applies here. Because I was a hands-on investor, I was in a position to clearly see patterns and myths about entrepreneurs. These entrepreneur myths cost me $50 million to learn. So you could say each of these 50 chapters is worth $1 million.
Background
I was infected by the entrepreneur virus at the age of 20. I wasn’t born to be an entrepreneur — my goal was to be a professional soccer player. Since then, I’ve gone through the entrepreneur journey quite a few times, learning by doing.
Wearing both the venture capitalist and entrepreneur hats, I see that entrepreneurs and investors have many ideas and practices that are just plain fucking fantasies, out-of-date dogma or misperceptions. They acquire these myths from the media, word-of-mouth from other entrepreneurs or from entrepreneur-published books that focus on the psychobabble aspect of starting a business.
You should read as many books as you can on business and entrepreneurship. But remember this: most books on entrepreneurship don’t focus on providing real world, real-time advice. They talk about the past rather than the current state of entrepreneurship.
Things move rapidly in the land of entrepreneurship. Look at the current velocity of high-valued tech companies in Silicon Valley and Silicon Alley. No one can predict how long it will last. But it proves the point that rapid innovation in the marketplace brings down existing beliefs about entrepreneurship.