Summary of Scott Kupor's Secrets of Sand Hill Road

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.

Book Preview: #1 The tech and investment world was different in the 1990s. It was a great time to be starting out in the tech industry, as there seemed to be no end to the promise of technology and the amount of wealth creation available to everyone involved.

#2 I was completely oblivious to the tech boom around me, as I had spent my time after graduating from Stanford University and Stanford Law School in Houston, Texas, clerking for the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in Silicon Valley.

#3 I had finally opened my eyes to what was happening around me, and I wanted to be a part of it. I had just been hired by LoudCloud, a startup that sought to turn computing power into a utility. As an engineer, you should be able to develop your custom application and then just plug it in to the compute utility.

#4 I interviewed with several members of the team, including cofounder Ben Horowitz. He was dressed in Oakland Raiders gear, which was completely in character. I now know that his attire was completely in character.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Mar 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669364160

IRB Media

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Book preview

Insights on Scott Kupor's Secrets of Sand Hill Road

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 5

Insights from Chapter 6

Insights from Chapter 7

Insights from Chapter 8

Insights from Chapter 9

Insights from Chapter 10

Insights from Chapter 11

Insights from Chapter 12

Insights from Chapter 13

Insights from Chapter 14

Insights from Chapter 15

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The tech and investment world was different in the 1990s. It was a great time to be starting out in the tech industry, as there seemed to be no end to the promise of technology and the amount of wealth creation available to everyone involved.

#2

I was completely oblivious to the tech boom around me, as I had spent my time after graduating from Stanford University and Stanford Law School in Houston, Texas, clerking for the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in Silicon Valley.

#3

I had finally opened my eyes to what was happening around me, and I wanted to be a part of it. I had just been hired by LoudCloud, a startup that sought to turn computing power into a utility. As an engineer, you should be able to develop your custom application and then just plug it in to the compute utility.

#4

I interviewed with several members of the team, including cofounder Ben Horowitz. He was dressed in Oakland Raiders gear, which was completely in character. I now know that his attire was completely in character.

#5

I was hired as a business development manager at LoudCloud, a company that provided compute utilities for other startup companies. We had raised nearly $60 million of debt and equity, but we were dangerously low on cash due to the post-2000 dot-com collapse.

#6

The buyout investors, who were more interested in controlling a company than funding it, were willing to pay less for LoudCloud than the VCs. The IPO allowed us to raise sufficient capital to keep the company afloat without having to give up control of it.

#7

I had the opportunity to manage the integration of the Opsware team into HP Software, and then to run the roughly $1 billion global software support business. With 1,500 employees scattered across every major global market, I logged more airline miles than I have ever done in my professional life.

#8

Angels are typically individuals who invest in very-early-stage startups. In Silicon Valley in 2007, the angel community was small, and there were not many institutional seed funds, so angel investing was dominated by a loose collection of individuals who were writing checks out of their personal accounts.

#9

The second material transformation in the startup ecosystem was the advent of an incubator known as Y Combinator, which created startup school. It turned out nearly 1,600 promising startups, including some very well-known success stories such as Airbnb,