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Why Venture Capitalists Don't Want You to Have a Sex Life

by Tim Berry on May 14, 2008

Browsing the Wall Street Journal’s online offerings, I just picked up Why Venture Capitalists Don’t Want You to Have a Sex Life. It’s one of several online reactions to John Doerr’s (of Kleinert Perkins Caufield & Byers) much-quoted comment on how many successful entrepreneurs had no lives outside of their work.

The source of all that is an interview published on Venturewire. Specifically, Doerr says:

“That correlates more with any other success factor that I’ve seen in the world’s greatest entrepreneurs. If you look at Bezos, or [Netscape Communications Corp. founder Marc] Andreessen, [Yahoo Inc. co-founder] David Filo, the founders of Google, they all seem to be white, male, nerds who’ve dropped out of Harvard or Stanford and they absolutely have no social life. So when I see that pattern coming in — which was true of Google — it was very easy to decide to invest.”

Final thought: the title of this post, which was also the title of the WSJ piece, is a good illustration of how titles work in blogs.

Photo by Randy Son of Robert, From Why Venture Capitalists Don’t Want You to Have a Sex Life.

About Tim Berry

Tim Berry

Tim Berry is the founder of Palo Alto Software, a co-founder of Borland International, and a recognized expert in business planning. Tim is the originator of plan-as-you-go business planning. He has an MBA from Stanford and degrees with honors from the University of Oregon and the University of Notre Dame. Today, Tim dedicates most of his time to blogging, teaching, and evangelizing for business planning. His full biography is available on his blog.

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