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Lee Campbell's comment about how VCs see the companies they invest in as at-bats rather than as their own babies is correct and concise. VCs are like sea turtles laying eggs. Only some of the baby turtles make it across the beach, and only some of those survive and mature. VCs expect that not all of their ventures will succeed. So long as the VCs get enough overall return on their investments, to them the problems of one sea turtle in this crazy world don't amount to a hill of beans.
Today (3 May 2001) I heard someone on Morning Edition say that venture capitalists "take risks." I suppose they do, in the same sense that casinos take risks, fully understanding the idea of "expected value" over a large enough set of random outcomes.
From what I can tell by reading Philip's books and Philip's, Eve's, and Ars Digita's web sites, the Ars Digita founders' ethic involved working at the to...
Don Baccus, co-leader of the OpenACS project, wrote to point out my inaccurate an misleading use of "open ACS" in a comment I left earlier on this page. What I should have written is something like "making ACS freely available and keeping it about as open as any system that includes proprietary and non-open source components can be." I apologize for creating the impression that I was commenting on or attributing credit for OpenACS.