The biggest downward ticks to my personal net worth have been due to me relying on skills that I dont exercise often. Over time I have calibrated my judgement to mark the value of infrequently exercised skills to zero even though I might think I am a natural at them.
VCs are terrible at this. I can't tell you how many times in the past 20 years I've heard VCs say things like "you should move into [tangentially related area that we can't add value to that just had a big exit]"
For instance, when youtube got bought, VCs were all interested in investing in online video companies. At that point, though, Youtube had already been bought! They were like 5 years too late.
That might well be true, the point I was trying to make was that as an employee its dangerous to make decisions based on the belief that you are great at picking winning teams / companies. Sure VC's are bad it too, but theyre sensible enough to do it with other peoples money.
