I recently had the pleasure of chatting with Harry Stebbings, founder & host of The Twenty Minute VC. Harry’s done a great job growing the platform from the ground up and has interviewed many of my closest friends and colleagues in the venture world. In the interest of your time and attention span, I won’t recite the full conversation-for that you can listen to the entire episode-but below I’ve shared a few core topics we discussed and my current thinking on the state of venture capital and more.

On my path into venture capital

In the mid 1990s, when I started using the internet, I realized that the Internet was going to create fundamental change through a variety of industries. I thought: “wouldn’t my life be so much better if I could be part of a growing pie fundamentally changing growth as opposed to fighting over a shrinking pie in distress buyouts (the industry I had come from). So I transitioned to VC and spent some time in venture both in SF and in New York City before leaving to become an entrepreneur and then loop back into VC later in life with the creation of FirstMark.

On the value of being an entrepreneur before a VC

You understand that you have to have deep empathy for entrepreneurs and startup teams. When you talk about employees and their performance in the organization, they’re not just boxes on the org chart — they are people who are doing their best. When you talk about cutting expenses, reorganizing or changing things in a PowerPoint, it creates a real human impact. You might have to replace somebody who was a longtime member of the team or there might be some nuance which you can’t simply capture in a couple-hour board meeting. In short, you understand that the journey, especially the human side, is much more complex.

Read the full post on Medium here.