Holmes on Creative Capital, by Spencer Ante: the life of Georges Doriot, the general who made venture capital an industry. Watson: invents it? Holmes: not as a firm; 1946, the first public venture fund, $3.4 million, and Kettering gave it five years. It lasted twenty-five, on one rule: treat a company like a child. 1957: $70,000 for seventy percent of Digital Equipment. Lestrade: what use was that? Nine years on, five hundred times the money, for those who wait.
Creative Capital, by Spencer Ante, 2008, is the biography of Georges Doriot, the Harvard professor and wartime general who in 1946 became president of the first public venture capital firm, ARD, with a first fund of $3.4 million and a prediction from Charles Kettering that it would be bust in five years; it ran twenty-five, on Doriot's rule of treating companies as children and waiting, and its 1957 purchase of 70 percent of Digital Equipment for $70,000 was worth five hundred times the money at the 1966 IPO.
On the book: Creative Capital by Spencer E. Ante
▶ Keep watching in the feedStarring
Tags
Source
Creative Capital: Georges Doriot and the Birth of Venture Capital
Harvard Business Review Press · Jan 1, 2008
