Learning by Doing
One thing i am totally convinced about: the only way to become good as something in any field is by practicing. Observing, listening, thinking, considering, debating, arguing, correcting, advising, mentoring and even investing is definitely not enough. I would even say it could jeopardize what you believe your skill can be.
I have so many personal examples of that. I learned playing jazz alone. A key starting point for me was the discovery of late pianist Erroll Garner. It stimulated my brain to understand how it is possible to take a dead boring melody and make an amazing piece of art out of it in Real Time. I then started to listen and listen. Read about jazz. go to concerts. Eventually what really helped me was putting myself on the piano and get to understand how those chords and harmonies are built and how you build a new melody on top of a melody (usually called improvisation)
I think the same applies in the web. No matter how much you can read about startups, meet with entrepreneurs, go to conference, even invest in startups. At the end of the day the only real way to understand how to build a great web service is by actually creating one. Although i was already a big fan of Twitter and the iPhone, i learned much more about those ecosystems by doing Topify and AppsFire and bumping into an endless number of challenges and issues than by using related services or reading blogs about them for nearly 2 years.
Because this is what it is about. Problem solving. Until you find yourself in front of a massive wall you need climb you can't understand what the story is all about. I am not only referring to the technical part of the solution but the psychological part of it. Understanding the pressure of emergency and ongoing competition is not something you can explain. You need to experience it.
The other critical part of problem solving is find the right way to make it as simple as possible. And this is REALLY hard. The obvious in appearance is complex in execution (Einstein once said "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler"). Finding the simplest path to a problem solution is really hard. And there is no magical formula except doing and iterating. Learning by doing = Learning by failing.
In addition cycles of iteration help you improve each time a little about the way you solve problems. This is why i believe Israeli entrepeneurs, that are originally not so good at building consumer related stuff, are becoming better and better at it. The first generation of web entrepreneurs are starting new stuff again and the quality of execution becomes each time better, because they learned how to solved some specific issues.
My personnal recommendation to anyone who wants to jump into the web space: create something. Even minor. If you have to recruit someone be it an employee, a contractor or a consultant, find someone who actually created something (that you can relate to your space of course). I prefer looking at a mashup you created or a blog you are writing than at a resume.
You can enjoy food as much as you want and be a gourmet expert. There is no way you be good at cooking if you never experimented cooking. But unlike cooking and jazz the great things about the web is that the learning process is pretty unexpensive. The cost of technology is close to zero (before scale). And the feedback process is immediate (unlike music). So you should not hesitate to jump.
I created TechCrunch France with zero investment. We set Topify, Appsfire and soon project TD with zero dollar investment. You need just some time and complementary skills to start. And those are not great examples because i can't say those are massive sucesses. But they give a pretty good sense of what is possible to do with very little.
As a VC i know this is helping me also understand better companies i meet. I am not sure this is a recipe for all investors. But for me this is the recipe that works.
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