The Making of Planet VC

PLANET VC, the new book by myself and Terrance Philips , began with a prisoner.

That was Terrance, dressed up in balls and chains at a Halloween party, where we were introduced by the host. I must admit I wasn’t in costume, which is lame. Sorry. It was 2019, the last year anyone would be throwing a big party for a while. I should have made the effort!

Fast forward a year, and Terrance was looking for someone to help him realize a dream. He had cut his teeth at Silicon Valley Bank, which despite the name had a considerable business in Asia. Terrance worked with its clients – venture-capital firms and their portfolio companies – across the region. Later he joined Citi as a managing director, but he still had the venture bug.

These days, VC gets a lot of attention, but that’s a phenomenon of the loose-money bubble of 2019-2021. Until then, it was niche, even in the US. More so in Asia. It only got the world’s attention in 2020, when?The Economist?put the VC industry on its cover and the journalist Sebastian Mallaby wrote a well-regarded book explaining how VC works.

But that attention focused on the US. And for good reason, because VC as we know it was forged in the cauldron of Silicon Valley. Other business historians have linked it to a uniquely American style of capitalism, going back to New England’s eighteenth-century whaling days.

Terrance had been in the trenches helping embed this American way to fund risky startups in markets around the world. But VC remained obscure in those places, its story untold. He wanted to change that. But he’s a banker, not a writer. A mutual friend who knew I had written books connected us. I didn’t know much about VC, but I was writing about fintech, and I was interested in learning more about startups.

Only later did we figure out that we had met before, when he was Prisoner Number 8048. By then we were knee-deep in a project to understand the origins of innovation in the world beyond Silicon Valley.

PLANET VC is officially out on August 23. Our first interviews were in late 2020. We thought we’d have it sewn up in six months. Ha! We got it to the publisher in late 2022, and kept making revisions as the world of venture capital turned upside down. Silicon Valley Bank collapsed in April of this year – triggering yet more revisions. By then we had hit the publisher’s absolute deadline. The world continued to spin but we had managed to ensure our story would remain current into this new macro cycle.

Now it’s here. We’ve told the story of VC beyond Silicon Valley, which is another way to say we’ve told the story (in one way) of how Asia modernized into multiple centers of technology and innovation, along with Israel (West Asia) and Europe.

For US entrepreneurs, investors, academics, and policymakers, it’s a great introduction to why the rest of the world increasingly matters to innovation. For those in Asia, PLANET VC is a blueprint to what’s worked and what hasn’t, and puts local success stories in the context of global trends. We also weigh the question of whether VC will be relevant in the new megatrend cycle.

You can pre-order it from Amazon and online from several bookstores. We’re excited to share the stories from PLANET VC, so contact me if you’d like to host us for a talk.

• Amazon?https://lnkd.in/d_NEyfbG
• Barnes & Noble?https://lnkd.in/dCqBWnXV
• Books A Million?https://lnkd.in/dPBdbBu4
• Harriman House (our publisher)?https://lnkd.in/dcJyv45Y

P.S. Author royalties from print and e-book sales are going to Children’s Medical Foundation.