I’ll answer the second part question since the first part is all too subjective. As some people tend the enjoy the “torture” that comes with an undeserving 12-year (or so) fund management fee.
The joke is that if you don’t succeed in venture capital, you can always move on to private equity. Put simply: if, as a venture capitalist, you do not succeed in aligning with foresight, you can always escape into investing in an extrapolation of hindsight. The same asset class but applying downside risk to post chasm growth trajectories attached to innovation bound to sub-optimize the norm you can learn about in business school, rather than the much harder upside investing related to pre-chasm risk designed to break the norm from risk-taking you have proven to excel in.
Save, of course, for the many firms that by their subpriming through deal fragmentation, deal syndication and collusion have turned the risk model of venture capital into a cooperative of micro private equity risk without skipping a beat, whilst dragging the now subprime thesis that determines what can be discovered (Einstein) with it in the demise of its self-induced 99.4% failure rate. With the aforementioned investor-socialism is guaranteed to tag outliers as false negatives.
And then we have a graveyard of many walking-dead VC firms, dispensing advice that should be entirely ignored by entrepreneurs.
The venture business needs some new rules of the road to enhance and extend the contribution of innovation towards renewable socioeconomic value humanity cares about.
