Overall you need to be very rounded as a VC and no one background provides that.

Re metrics – you also get that experience as a consultant, and as a VC.

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Nic, do you have a sense of the percentage of total VCs who come from an operational background?

But more important than operational experince can be to be more open minded and to take the effort to understand a unusual business concept, what most VCs are not willing to do so.

99% of them even do not respond to email requests … Listen carefully VC Fund investors…!

If they do answer to email requests and do not step into a dialogue with the entrepreneur, how can they find the 'next big thing' and make money for their Fund investors?

My experince with VCs is that they are looking for the 'next big thing', but still want something which has an 'proof of concept', means an other copy of something. And this is definitly NOT the next big thing!

A good example for this is Google, they went two years searching through Silicon Valley to raise funding for their SE. Nobody has finance them.

They raised one million privately – 'love money' through family and friends, set up their SE and than the big 'vorward thinking' (I laugh) VCs gave them their first funding.
They simply jump on the rolling train, with very low risk!

Imagine what has happen if they 'should not have' raised this first one million of 'love money' from familiy and friends! Today we've had no Google!

In my opinion 99,99% of VCs out there do not recognize 'the next big thing' when it slaps them directly in their faces. They want a GURANTEED profit, with low, very low risk, better no risk!

With this kind of attitude the most of them will never get the opportunity to be invested in the 'next big thing'!

If there is one outstanding VC between all it is Michael Moritz, he's got my highest consideration not only because he is a good Christian (any miracle here?:)) but most of all because I don't see any other VC on earth who possibly has any similar “star record”, he is THE “serial”; only half of one of those hits would have hyper satisfied any LPs of any European VCs: YHOO (I recall: 25% if the shares for $m1 with IPO less than a couple years later in the range of $b5 valuation if my memory's correct), GOOG, Apple, Paypal, Youtube (despite Youtube's exit looks like a double “self-service” off GOOG where he was seating on the board…) etc.

The other interesting point about your post's question applied to MM's background, besides the fact in had no operational background in a start-up, is that his previous experience was dealing with “Intelligence”, information, IT oriented… very curious guy, with unique ability to manage information, exploit its essence and develop a vision out of it. I remember I was explaining precisely this about five years ago to someone in London precisely about this operational background subject!…:) Then a virtuous circle is coming into place to reinforce this key initial edge (big brands names attracting the best deals…)

After this being said, MM had excellent academic background enabling him to have and develop further this vast set of functional competences VC requires in human resources, strategy, marketing, finance, operations… the flair he has, not coming from any start-up operational background either, might result more from good intuition on people rather than academic courses…

Now I think I know at least a couple companies which should interest MM… )