Reading, writing, quarterly results

In Silicon Valley, venture capital has become a required subject -- even for fourth graders.

By Mark Gimein

Oct 13, 1999 | Jonathan X -- I use only his first name because to reveal his full name could sabotage his ambitions -- has lived in San Francisco for two months. He works at a small investment banking firm. And he is itching to meet venture capitalists.

"Next week," Jonathan says, "I'm going to a party that Steve Jurvetson will be at," naming with reverence a particularly high-profile specimen. He networks with venture capitalists by playing online games (all venture capitalists are known, practically by definition, to be furiously competitive at all games). He is familiar with all the bits of trivia about venture capitalists. He knows, for instance, that every year all the venture capitalists in Silicon Valley -- at any rate, all the ones who matter -- congregate for a soapbox derby, barreling down an infamous slope on Sand Hill Road (the Boardwalk and Park Place of the species) in makeshift four-wheeled contraptions, showing off their engineering chops and proving, once again, that Silicon Valley is really about a bunch of guys having fun.

Jonathan is excited about the kinds of things that venture capitalists get excited about. When he buys something online and he gets the wrong shipment, he does not, as most people would, curse the Internet; instead, he starts talking about the unrecognized business opportunity in customer service outsourcing.

What has brought Jonathan and me together is a class called BizWorld, or, as it's more formally called, Tim Draper's BizWorld. BizWorld is a class in how the business world works, or at any rate in how a particular vision of the business world works: that of a venture capitalist like Tim Draper himself. It's a class designed for fourth-grade kids.

For purposes of a training session for BizWorld's volunteer instructors, Jonathan and I are both members of the Blue Chips. We, the Blue Chips, are locked in the throes of a vigorous competition with the Yellow Jackets and the Green Lights to corner the market on friendship bracelets. Friendship bracelets -- those twirled strands of twine you make as elementary school projects: You put one on your wrist, and your friend puts an identical one on his wrist, and it means you're friends forever, except that the bracelets come off in the shower about three days later and lose whatever meaning they had.

I believe that we are the most high-powered group of friendship bracelet-makers ever assembled. Around the table with Jonathan and me are Georgette, a recent graduate of the UCLA business school; Jeff, a longtime software industry executive and "entrepreneur in residence" at a leading venture capital firm; and Liz, a coordinator of school volunteer programs. Georgette is president of the Blue Chips, Jonathan is vice president of finance (he had originally chosen the card for vice president of manufacturing, but surreptitiously changed it), Jeff is responsible for marketing, I rule the design department and Liz is vice president of advertising. All of us together are responsible for actually making the darn things, and at this we are all more or less equally inept.

If it had been up to me, we would all be fired on the spot, but it looks like we will be allowed to stay. Jonathan and his fellow volunteers might not be any good at making friendship bracelets, but there is one thing that's more important: an unbounded enthusiasm for disseminating the Gospel of the Silicon Valley Start-up through the nation's elementary schools.

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