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October 8, 2004
Stewart Alsop Never Learned How to be An Asshole
Stewart Alsop is stepping down from being a partner at venture firm NEA. One of the many folks who jumped into venture capital during the go-go days of the late 1990s, Alsop never sounded like he had entirely escaped his earlier journalistic preoccupation with simply being an enthusiastic identifier of cool stuff. (He famously said in 2001 that Treo would eclipse Nokia by 2005 -- whoops.)
More to the point, here are Alsop's comments (from an internal NEA email) on leaving:
"I am going to see if I can design a working life for myself that is focused entirely on working with a few early-stage companies, whether that is in a smaller partnership or something more individualized."
You can see the roots of the problem here. Alsop is an enthusiast and compassionate supporter of companies, not a hard-edged "no" guy who cheerfully turns down the vast majority of companies who land on his venture investing doorstep. But turning down people and saying "no" a lot is the inescable essence of being a venture guy in a large NEA-style fund -- and earning a high return for your investors.
There are clear signs of this discomfort in an interview with Alsop in Wireless Review last 2003. Called "The Aspiring VC", the piece has Alsop showing where the problem was for him as a VC:
"I'm trying to learn how to be more of an asshole," said Stewart Alsop, general partner at New Enterprise Associates, the country's largest venture capital firm. The way he sees it, VCs turn away 99.9% of the entrepreneurs who pitch ideas to them. And to deal out wholesale rejection in that volume, you have to disconnect from your more compassionate instincts.
"To say no that much, you basically have to enjoy it," he said. "I have to teach myself to enjoy it."
Alsop apparently never learned how to be enough of an asshole to be a happy VC.
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