A Brief Book Review of A Dozen Lessons for Entrepreneurs by Tren Griffin
I have often enjoyed the writing of Tren Griffin. He authored a book called Charlie Munger: The Complete Investor that I liked so much I read it twice in a few months. And his blog, 25iq.com, is a treasure of insightful posts on many aspects of business; his articles on customer acquisition costs are particularly strong, and I’ve shared them with friends and business contacts repeatedly. So I‘m always excited to pick up any writing he puts out. But something felt off in this book. Perhaps it was the format and structure, or perhaps it was the subjects. Griffin has clearly studied Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett, and Howard Marks deeply. And his experiences working beside Bill Gates and Craig McCaw have sharpened his mind in ways I’d love to see him share even more. While his knowledge of these titans of business was incredibly enlightening and charming in the pages of his book on Munger, it felt repetitive and trite here—though I’m not sure it’s Griffin’s fault.
In each chapter, we are introduced to a particular start up coach or venture capitalist; after a few sentences about where they went to school or worked, we learn they either invested in household name-brand companies such as Twitter, Uber, AirBnB, Google, or in tech companies I’ve definitely never heard of (and I would doubt you have either), but we are to assume were smashing successes; we are then shown 12 out of context quotes from each which Griffin tries to add some depth to or to contextualize by comparing to ideas espoused by Munger, Buffett, Marks, et al. I don’t doubt that their ideas relate. Indeed, the term “value investor” is a misnomer; all “investors” hunt for “value”, even if the self-imposed rules of their hunt differ.
The problem is that while Munger, Buffett, Marks, et al. are well-known billionaires with public records of their successes, failures, unique stories, and backgrounds, and lovable foibles, the venture capitalists in this book largely blend into a grey, undifferentiated mass. Despite what seem to be Griffin’s efforts to have a diverse array of subjects, they are largely all of the same demographic. (Yes, that one.) Some come across as especially interesting, but they are the exception that proves the rule. Okay, okay, okay; you went to Stanford undergrad and Harvard Business School and know better than to have too large a venture fund if you want to get 3x over ten years for your limited partners, given the few venture-grade companies you are likely to meet that will have exits large enough to keep your lights on. But what are your returns? What were your worst investments, and why? What did you do to help any of those name-brand companies mentioned in your bio succeed?
We learn some useful things, as will happen in any Griffin work because Griffin is a strong teacher: We learn that missionary entrepreneurs persist longer and build better businesses than mercenary entrepreneurs; we learn that the value of a venture capitalist isn’t the check he or she writes but his or her network and the help provided to entrepreneurs around knotty questions related to fundraising, pricing, distribution, and recruitment; we learn that the only sin in business is running out of cash; we learn that great products lead to great brands, not the other way around; we learn that magnitude of success in investing is more important than frequency of success; we learn that venture capital is more cyclical and more of a crapshoot than most outside the industry realize; we learn it is better to be a learn-it-all than a know-it-all; we learn that “growth-hacking” is possibly a bullshit term for “sales and marketing”; we learn that being a visionary is easier than being an operator; we learn that there is no way to learn how to invest or run a company other than to invest or run a company; and we learn that were it not for power law outcomes, convexity, lock-ups, and strong contractual law and public markets, venture capital wouldn’t impress.
Not a bad book but not Griffin’s best either. Again, Griffin is a great teacher; but often I think the best teachers work hard to show their students that primary sources are usually more valuable than secondary sources. To this end, the book might have been improved were it structured like Jack D. Schwager’s great series of books on investing where he essentially prints the interview transcript with his subjects and works to show how their styles of investing differ from each other. Or perhaps that wouldn’t have helped because the subjects here just aren’t that differentiated.