Having an investor on your board of directors who is naive about public markets or finds them complex or scary is non-optimal.
From Bill Gurley
I think one of the key differentiators I bring to the table as a venture capitalist is a solid understanding of the public markets and how they operate.
If the goal is to build companies that maximize long-term equity value, then optimizing corporate performance in a way that Wall Street appreciates is obviously critical to that goal.
I have never seen Jeff Bezos, Marc Benioff, or Reed Hastings complain about being public. Nor have they ever argued that being public prevented them from doing things with a long-term focus.
It's really hard to run a business against somebody who is not acting as if it were in business.
Almost everybody who thinks about local thinks about daily deals, but companies like OpenTable and Zillow and Yelp are all getting their money from the local market.
It's not for everybody to tweet, it's for everybody to follow. The more people figure that out, they see it's RSS-plus. It's literally the place you check for information.
Facebook has stitched together your social graph. The idea of an interest graph is to bring together everyone that has shared interests. If I can isolate the people who are into mountain biking in Marin, in one place, the ability to put ads against that is really high.
I think one thing that may have happened with both Facebook and Zynga is that they may have waited too long to go public. They got particularly cute on that front.
Venture capital is unscalable. Production equals the time each partner has.
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