Silicon Valley Nation
Silicon Valley Nation: Venture capital pioneer Paul Wythes dies
Brian Fuller
11/7/2012 10:42 AM EST
From engineering to business
A summer job at the drafting board at RCA turned him off from bench engineering and got him starting to think about the business side of a technology career.
In his oral-history interview, Wythes suggested many of the basics of investing have not changed, even though the venture capital industry has evolved over the decades.
He also talked about the notion of deferred gratification, noting he and his wife saved for a time to buy that big blue Pontiac he drove around the valley:
Wythes, who leaves a wife, Marcia, and three children, died two days before another of his investments, the San Francisco Giants, won their second World Series championship in three years.
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A summer job at the drafting board at RCA turned him off from bench engineering and got him starting to think about the business side of a technology career.
"I looked around RCA at that group I was with, and these were people that were engineers, they were, I don’t know, 50- 55- 60-years-old, and they are still at the drafting board. And I said, I don’t’ think I want to do that."After graduating from Princeton and getting a business degree from Stanford, Wythes worked for Honeywell and Beckman before a friend asked him to start a venture capital arm of the real estate firm Sutter Hill Corp. It was just a few years after the SBIC, which allowed the SBA to license private "Small Business Investment Companies" to help with financing and managing small entrepreneurial businesses in the United States, was enacted.
In his oral-history interview, Wythes suggested many of the basics of investing have not changed, even though the venture capital industry has evolved over the decades.
"In this business you’ve got to do a lot of hard work, you’ve got to have some smarts, you’ve got to be a pretty good judge of character, and you’ve got to have some luck. Those are the four things that count most in this business. Luck isn’t 80 percent, but it’s certainly 10 or 20 percent. Hard work and good judgment about people are very important."
He also talked about the notion of deferred gratification, noting he and his wife saved for a time to buy that big blue Pontiac he drove around the valley:
"You know, people today want to start with a BMW as their first car or a Mercedes. They don’t really have much in the way of deferred gratification. Money is there for doing a good job, and it’s a fall-out for doing a good job, I don’t view it as the ultimate goal. I would hope I would live better than I lived when I was a kid growing up, and I think that’s the dream of everybody in this country. I have done much better economically than I ever thought I would do, which is a nice outcome, but it was not my primary objective or goal when I entered the VC profession."
Wythes, who leaves a wife, Marcia, and three children, died two days before another of his investments, the San Francisco Giants, won their second World Series championship in three years.
Related stories:
-- Silicon Valley Nation: You want how much?!
--Silicon Valley Nation: California's slow bleed
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