Do VCs Need Tech Backgrounds?

We've hit a point where technology, whether it's because of the cloud or mobile technologies or interconnectivity. I really believe that the foreign language requirement for every student in any college should be computer science. It is sort of, it is the language of technology. And I think, you know, not just venture capital, but almost any field that as a Stanford student you want to go into, whether it's as a minor or some way. Being comfortable and versant in the language of computers is critically important for, you know, having a, you know, foundational grounding for, for the future of whatever you're going to do. You know, in my particular case, I have always been, it's just been always a personal passion point even before I went to Stanford in computers, in technology, really wanting to know how technology worked. And even, even in, you know, a lot of my investing career, I've invested in companies and in parts of the markets that are more, they focus on selling deeper technology products to enterprises. And I think if, if that's an area of the investing landscape that you have interest in, then having a technical degree, a deeper technical degree absolutely matters because it's very hard to understand, you know, if there's a, you know, in a sea of companies that are building next generation infrastructure for the cloud and you have to get deep into, you know, the stack really knowing whether something can be special or can be differentiated. It's hard to do that without a true technical educational foundation. But I think in the investing world today, you know, such, and we may talk about it later, such a broad amount of the opportunity are actually in companies which are much further up the stack. I mean the tools that, you know, today versus when I was graduating from Stanford in the 80s that are available, I mean you can be relatively non technical and in the Amazon cloud you can stand up, you know, a computing infrastructure that deals with literally petabytes of data. You have all the ability to create sort of on demand, a very scalable and friendly, you know, web application experience for users. So I think, I think really that the requirement to have a technical degree to go into venture capital is less today and I think it's more about choosing a degree where you learn to think critically.