The poetic stylings of Sand Hill Road
We're used to venture capitalists having, um, "wild" and "exciting" hobbies in their downtime. Like Bill Tai of Charles River Ventures, who spends his time kitesurfing. Or Kleiner Perkins founder Tom Perkins, the yachting enthusiast. Or First Round Capital's Josh Kopelman, who dabbled in indoor skydiving. Venture capitalists are supposed to be daring and innovative, which is why we can't get our heads around this latest trend: VC as poet. After the jump, a brief history of the genre — and the latest atrocious example.
The first dude who did this was Sand Hill fratboy Tim Draper, who penned the lyrics to "Riskmaster," and its Cyrillic sequel "Another Riskmaster." Then, at the Stirr holiday mixer last year, a group of VCs going by the name The Uprounds debuted the atrocious "Jingle Bells, YouTube Sells". At search startup Powerset's party celebrating their series A funding, Foundation Capital partner Charles Moldow crafted a self-serving "Ode to Powerset."
The latest entrant is Bessemer Ventures partner David Cowan, who last night recited a limerick celebrating the closing of Bessemer-backed enterprise email startup Postini to Google. Here's Cowan's poem:
There once was a founder named Scott Who invented a messaging bot That filtered out spam — be it virus or scam — Now we never get spam (not a lot).
John, who led us with class,
Thought a quick IPO would be crass.
But Cowan kept cryin'
To Quentin and Ryan
Which gave John a pain in the ass.For spam and archive retrieval
Google came, and caused upheaval!
Are we now Googlini,
Postoogle, Gostini?
All they told us is just: Don't Be Evil.
