This work provides a revealing history of the venture capital industry as told through first-person accounts. It chronicles the industry's beginnings and highlights the differences between America's West and East coast firms. More than thirty leading venture capitalists - from early pioneers such as Eugene Kleiner and Arthur Rock to current top players like Geoff Yang and John Dorrer - reveal insights gleaned from their personal experiences in successful deal-making. "Until a few years ago," notes journalist-consultant Udayan Gupta, "venture capitalists were hardly on anyone's radar screen." That's not the case these days, as financiers who used to work behind the scenes now regularly set markets afire with their public support of high-profile technology and Internet stocks. In Done Deals , Gupta allows 35 of the brightest stars in what has become a $30-billion-a-year business to tell their own stories in their own words. We get to see exactly what they were thinking when they backed such endeavors as Intel, eBay, Excite, Genentech, and 3Com. Gupta's intention is to demonstrate how the industry has changed over the past half-century and how it differs today among its various forms. He achieves this beautifully by dividing the first-person accounts into thematically attuned sections that focus on dealmakers of the future (such as Mitch Kapor of Accel Partners), early pioneers (including the late Benno Schmidt of J.H. Whitney & Co.), West Coast veterans (such as Don Valentine of Sequoia Capital), past and present East Coast practitioners (like Charles Waite of Greylock Management), and visionaries (including John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers). Some of the stories are more detailed than others, but taken together, they provide a well-rounded view that will interest anyone who must deal with this often intertwined yet still individual world. --Howard Rothman Gupta, a small-business development and strategy consultant and freelance business journalist, examines the venture capital industry through interviews of 35 of its major players. He looks at the early venture capitalists and contrasts them with today's notable players. He also explains the historical distinction between the East Coast group and the West Coast, Silicon Valley practitioners, with the former emphasizing financial engineering to gain tax benefits and financial returns, whereas those in the West take a chance on a fledgling technology and nurture the scientist. However, this distinction has blurred as the industry rapidly grows. Interviews include representatives of the newest incarnation of venture capitalists, famous names from both the East and West Coasts, and future visionaries. This is an interesting chronicle of an industry that 20 years ago invested $1 billion in portfolio companies and raised less than $700 million, and in 2000 is projected to both invest and raise new funds in excess of $30 billion. Mary Whaley Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved " Done Deals is compelling reading." -- Business 2.0 , September, 12, 2000 There was a time in the 1980s when the dreams of business-school graduates from the elite Ivy League centered on Wall Street. Bankers and traders were superstars, the larger-than-life protagonists of hit movies such as Wall Street and bestselling books such as Liar's Poker . Few wept, though, when the market crashed in the early autumn of 1987 and the denizens of Wall Street became national scapegoats for the excesses of the Reagan era. The center of wealth creation was already sliding westward, toward Silicon Valley. As the computer spawned the hardware industry, the software industry, the networking industry and finally the Internet, the financiers of that hypergrowth – the venture capitalists – became the new rock stars. Business-school graduates refocused accordingly. What has not changed is the desire to hear the story of wealth over and over again. The latest evidence: Done Deals , a collection of "how I did it" essays from 32 of the biggest stars in the venture capital firmament, edited by Biztrail.com founder Udayan Gupta. Where the rock-star world tends toward tales of success, failure and redemption, the venture capitalists featured here highlight only the success. Absent are embarrassing stories of portfolio companies failing miserably or times in which the VC might have put his (save for Ann Winblad of Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, the VCs here are all men) interests above his investments. Instead, the book provides a heavy dose of what's already saturating the almost universally laudatory business press: platitudes on "helping the entrepreneur" and "building companies for the long haul." Which is to be expected. With the amount of cash flowing into venture firms these days, little more separates one quality firm from another than the perception of the press. Bob Kagle of Benchmark Capital says as much about his investments, but the same could be