The First VC: Inventing the Capital Today's Entrepreneurs Both Love and Hate

Spencer Ante, another member of the national tech press corps, is getting quite a bit of attention for his new book, Creative Capital: Georges Doriot and the Birth of Venture Capital.

Well-known blogging VC Fred Wilson appreciated learning about his profession's beginnings. The Boston Globe and Financial Times both gave it nice reviews.

Doriot worked out of Boston, but of course the VC game is now centered in Silicon Valley, where venture capitalists act as the financial engine behind many tech start-ups. It will be interesting, though, to see how tech venture capital evolves. Thanks to plummeting costs and rocketing power of hardware and software tools, a lot of tech companies can be started on a relative shoestring. More and more tech entrepreneurs are choosing to raise start-up money on their own rather than give a large chunk of their company to a VC firm.

Much of the VC business is still the same as when Doriot did it. (Doriot apparently often said, "I'll take an A individual with a B idea over a B individual with an A idea." Over the past decade, I've probably heard two dozen high-level tech VCs proclaim some version of that.) But VCs might not wield quite the same clout they did in the 1990s.

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