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I'd been a great angel investor, but professional venture capital was clearly not the right thing for me.

I don't think a lot of people have been entrepreneurial about venture capital.

So many folks in the venture capital business are sheep that just want to follow the herd. They are momentum investors purchasing highly illiquid investments. That is a recipe for disaster.

Venture capitalists buy minority positions in young companies they think will grow quickly; buy-out investors buy most or all of companies they think can be turned around by fixing a few basic things.

Increasingly, I'm inspired by entrepreneurs who run nonprofit organizations that fund themselves, or for-profit organizations that achieve social missions while turning a profit.

I'll say this: I can't think of one instance in my 20 years in venture capital in which I have wanted to sell a company before the entrepreneur.

Being an entrepreneur means the ability to think out of the box by putting away our fear of any risk, including financial.

To not run a venture into the ground, entrepreneurs need to learn what it takes to succeed.

Like most plutocrats, I, too, am a proud and unapologetic capitalist. I have founded, cofounded or funded over 30 companies across a range of industries. I was the first non-family investor in Amazon.com. I cofounded a company called aQuantive that we sold to Microsoft for 6.4 billion dollars. My friends and I, we own a bank.

Many entrepreneurs, and the venture investors who back them, seek to build billion-dollar companies.