Film · The screening room

Something Ventured

Name: Something Ventured
Director: Daniel Geller & Dayna Goldfine
Released: 2011

Daniel Geller & Dayna Goldfine (dirs.) · 2011

A documentary about the emergence of American venture capital, told by the people who invented it — the closest thing to a founding history of the asset class.

Why it is here

Released in 2011 and running about eighty-four minutes, it interviews the venture capitalists who backed Apple, Intel, Genentech, Cisco, Atari and Tandem, in a period when the model itself was being improvised.

The value for an angel is watching people describe decisions made without any of the apparatus that now exists — no comparables, no established terms, no benchmarks. They were assessing founders and technology and very little else, which is exactly the position you are in at pre-seed.

It is also a useful corrective to the sense that the industry's conventions are laws. Most of them were invented by the people in this film, fairly recently, largely by trial and error.

The official trailer

SOMETHING VENTURED official US trailer

The official trailer, from the film's own distributor. Two minutes is enough to see why the founding generation of venture capital is worth eighty minutes of your evening.

Published by ZeitgeistFilms. Channel verified from zeitgeistfilms.com, and YouTube's own oEmbed response names that channel as this video's author. Pressing play loads content from YouTube.

Read it if

You want to see where the conventions you are being asked to accept actually came from.

Skip it if

You want contemporary relevance — the companies discussed are decades old.

Pair it withThe Power LawSebastian MallabyA financial historian on how venture capital became what it is, and why the distribution of outcomes makes it behave unlike any other asset class.

What it explains

Terms this covers

Term sheetA short, mostly non-binding summary of a proposed investment's key terms, signed before the full legal documents are drafted.Liquidation preferenceThe right of preferred shareholders to be paid a set amount — normally the money they invested — before ordinary shareholders receive anything from a sale or winding up.