Rachel L. Nelson

Interesting and candid autobiography

The honesty of this book meant the author grow on me.

Her central pitch is that she set up a venture capital fund for people like her: underprivileged, but also underestimated. The underestimation part - her investment thesis goes - makes people like her do a lot with a little, so if they had access to more than a little then they would do more than a lot. And that would generate wealth for investor and invested.

She did grow up poor, including periods of homelessness. She clearly worked hard to earn her way into critical jobs looking after successful people in the music industry.

I did not like much of her descriptions though as I could not see much outcomes, just a lot of externalised activity such as talking about her life enough to earn social media audiences.

She got me when she spoke about her alcoholism. It’s quite a raw honest account - from someone who managed to perform well at work while lying to herself, friends and colleagues - that I respected her a lot for sharing this. Thankfully having hit her rock bottom moment she managed to stop drinking and seems to have made a long term recovery. This is hard and impressive.

Hiding this information seemed to me to be sensible given that investors had placed money in her fund. It is a service to us all that she decided to speak candidly. But interestingly she has incorporated candour and authenticity into her work, gaining investors and investees who admire her. Good on her.

I have three let-downs about the book. First, she speaks of her venture capital fund. But she only had $2 million, which is the size of a small investment round by one venture capital into one company. Instead her whole fund is $2 million and her goal was to spend this on 100 companies. I understand that this is a function of the obstacles she faced on raising money as an underprivileged and under-represented founder.

Second, she spoke too much about herself and too little about the founders she found. Her investment thesis sounds good, and if it worked it should have led to good founders. I would have enjoyed hearing some of their struggles. She covered neither topic.

Third, she does not know or teach very much. When she teaches about a topic like how venture capital fund works, the choice of content showed a lack of understanding. Of course she cannot go into details, but the choices she made about what to cover and how to structure was arbitrary and confusing. I say this knowing the things she skipped over, I think she just does not know very much in this industry.

Her strength is in communication, and in standing up for herself and everyone she represents. I admire her for that.… (més)