WE POST ONE NEW BILLION-DOLLAR STARTUP IDEA every day.

Problem: Recently Clark Square Capital shared a list of interviews from the Venture Capitalists Oral History Project contributed by the Bancroft Library Oral Histories. Some of the histories included are from legendary venture capitalists like James C. Blair, Walter J. P. Curley, Peter O. Crisp, William Draper, Anthony B. Evnin, Alan Frazier, Edward F. Glassmeyer, Dick Kramlich, Paul Wythes, and more. These resources, while valuable, are not easy to find and often are not written out as transcripts.

Solution: This business would find the origins of and interview the changemakers in industries that are considered to be fundamental in the world today but actually were only started recently. While innovation can happen quickly, there is nothing new under the sun: every idea of the future pulls some inspiration from the past. The business would create a record of the past and the present to influence the future. They would do this through primary-source interviews to truly understand the life journey of an individual. If well received, the business could also expand to analyze the oral histories of businesses.

The Regional Oral History Office which I cited before has a phenomenal summary of this in the about page of their website:

Venture capital was not a term when these narrators began to practice “risk investment” in the late 1960s and early 1970s.  The oral histories describe the evolution of the field into the industry of today, focusing on its earliest emergence in Northern California. The narrators describe their circuitous routes into venture capital, their individual approaches to its practice, illustrative investments in key companies, the significance of its location in the Golden State, and its contributions to creating, financing, and building new companies, nationally and, increasingly, internationally.

Conceived and generously funded by Paul Bancroft III, with supplementary funding from William Draper III and Franklin Pitcher Johnson, the project in its third and final year has produced seventeen interviews with first-generation Californian venture capitalists, investment bankers, and attorneys. Fundraising for the second-phase—“Venture Capital After the Founding Generation: Has the Model Changed?”—is underway as of early 2011. The new project will interview venture capitalists active in the 1980s and 1990s and provide a comparative basis for an ever-changing industry.

Bessemer Venture Partners has a similar initiative in the business world with their memos about investing:

Like the knight’s sword, the firefighter’s hose, and the lumberjack’s ax, venture capitalists courageously wield the memo.

For VCs, learning from mistakes is easy. In fact, we make so many that we’re experts on what not to do. What’s hard is to learn from success. How did we spot those baby unicorns in the wild? Did we just get lucky? Because we really want to find more of them.

To glean patterns from those particularly beneficial early-stage decisions (and sometimes just to nourish our fragile egos), we find it helpful to publish and scrutinize the Investment Recommendation Memoranda that we circulated years ago. One pattern that consistently emerges is that Bessemer’s best investment decisions centered on people. In retrospect, the early products themselves are barely recognizable today. Rather, passionate, analytical and relentless founders zigged and zagged their way to that elusive “product-market fit”, and these memos provide a glimpse of those winning entrepreneurs before they were famous. They are the prequels of our heroes, as inspirational to us as The Hobbit, Solo, Batman Begins, and Better Call Saul.

Because, really, who doesn’t love a good memo?

In both projects, the focus in on the people who helped to create amazing industries or business. At its core, this oral history business would be a people business. Recording the life stories of and sharing the inspiration of the people who are constantly shaping the world.

One example of a competitor (though it plays in the non-profit space) is StoryCorps which collects stories from people of all backgrounds and beliefs. Founded in 2003 by David Isay, StoryCorps won two Peabody Awards in 2012 and 2007 and is syndicated on NPR. Unlike StoryCorps, this business would focus in the stories and learning on one industry to become experts that can create re-saleable knowledge.

Monetization: Selling these transcripts and recordings as books, story rights, or more.

Contributed by: Michael Bervell (Billion Dollar Startup Ideas)

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