I'm impressed that you planted a flag in the ground ("there are no best practices in venture capital") that goes against the grain of the thinking in many of your previous blog entries (on rifle versus shotgun and A-list executives).

Yes, Ralph Waldo Emerson would love me. I'm slowly coming to the view that what best practices there are in venture capital are more like trivial and undifferentating commonplaces: fund good companies, kill bad companies, push for results, etc. The real best practice is recognizing that there are no best practices, and that the business is better thought of an unscalable craft.

Or that the "best practices" in venture funding aren't traditional best practices and therefore are hard to identify in the traditional sense of identifying best practices.

It is not so much the characteristics of your deals, or the businesses that your fund that define best practices.

A business is a system, even a new business. A VC needs to have a understanding of systems and how this system is going to interact with other systems and the environment. Best practice for VCs isn't so much about "routine engineering" (firing CEOs, crunching numbers etc.), but understanding the system and, most importantly, using that understanding to achieve the goal of making money.

To take use terms from systems engineering, best practice in the VC business is identifying resonance frequencies, damping ratios and response to various inputs.