Silicon Valley: Practical wisdom for investors and entrepreneurs from 50 leading Silicon Valley angels and venture capitalists, reviewed

We look at this handy and, on the whole, insightful and useful book by Matthew Le Merle and Alison Davies. You can buy it from Amazon here, and learn more about the authors here.

Silicon Valley: Practical wisdom from 50 leading Silicon Valley angels and venture capitalists, reviewed

There is a lot to like about this book. The range of experts they have gathered is great, the gender mix and ethnic diversity is strong too, and very much mitigates those critiques of Silicon Valley that it is too white, too male, too Western. The interviews are, on the whole (we’ll explain our minor issues later) really good and insightful. The questions about what went well, and then also what failed to succeed, often elicited some really powerful observations.

For those interviewees who engaged with this process, it made for some great, readable interviews. The format also works well too, the font and the pages are large, most of the interviews only run over two to four pages, so if someone is not rocking your world the another interesting person is just around the corner.

The one caveat to this book, and in many ways it highlights the excellence of the other interviews, are those, thankfully in a minority, interviews where the responses were terse, short and uninformative. In some interviews the answers were glib, uninformative 1 liners, that offered no insights at all, and reflected poorly in the interviewee. Also, once we became accustomed to the format of the questions, it then felt like a missed opportunity when interviewees refused to answer the most insightful questions around their successes and their failures.

Answers like ‘it is too painful to talk about’ offers little to no help to anyone. In those interviews we felt it would have offered more value to push back and ask them to clarify and explain more. They didn’t need to name names or companies, but to duck the question felt unhelpful and offering less value than their peers in the book. From a journalistic point of view we felt a second edition would either push back and get more informative answers or just drop those interviews and replace them with people who were willing to be more informative.

Overall we think the majority of the interviews, perhaps even 90% are really strong and useful, and therefore it was just a little frustrating when you got to the more evasive interviewees. These profiles were very readable and make this book well worth reading.

Does #ElSalvador's adoption of #bitcoin make sense? I told @bkollmeyer @CallumKeown1 @barronsonline that "for smaller countries, Bitcoin is a superior solution to their own fiat currency” #blockchain https://t.co/udKS8sqACI

— matthew le merle (@mlemerle) June 9, 2021

More about the book

From the bestselling authors of The Fifth Era, Corporate Innovation in the Fifth Era and Blockchain Competitive Advantage comes a new book full of practical wisdom for investors and entrepreneurs from 50 leading Silicon Valley angels and venture capitalists

Contributions from more than 50 of Silicon Valley’s leading backers of early stage companies:
– What they have learned about early stage investing
– The secrets they wish they had known before they got started
– The wisdom and advice they want to share with you.

Fifth Era provides our investor circle an alternative asset platform that creates concentrated portfolios of hard to access early stage ventures. Fifth Era is the manager of Blockchain Coinvestors, the leading blockchain venture fund of funds and runs a coinvestment program for directly investing in emerging unicorns.

About
Matthew Le Merle is co-founder and Managing Partner of Fifth Era which manages Blockchain Coinvestors – the world’s leading blockchain venture fund of funds. Matthew is also Managing Partner of Keiretsu – the most active early stage venture investors backing almost 200 companies a year. He is Chairman of CAH, Securitize (Europe), Universal Protocol Alliance and Vice Chairman of SFOX.

Matthew grew up in England before living most of his life in Silicon Valley where he raised his five children with his wife Alison Davis. Today he splits his time between the US and UK. By day he is an investor in technology companies and a bestselling author and speaker on innovation, investing and the future having worked at McKinsey, A.T. Kearney, Monitor, Booz and Gap. In his spare time, he enjoys reading, writing and photography. He was educated at Christ Church, Oxford and Stanford and is an adjunct professor at Singularity U.

To learn more go to www.fifthera.com

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