Week 8 Reading Reflection

            Throughout this chapter, there were multiple facts that stood out to me. I do not have enough of a thorough knowledge about sources of capital for entrepreneurs to claim that I know a lot about the topic. One of the most surprising facts to me was there are about 7,000 commercial banks that function in the United States, and it has been predicated that in time there will only be about 4,000 left. I had no idea that this number was dropping so drastically, and I thought it was really interesting that this is happening.

One of the topics in the chapter that slightly confused me was the section that talked about venture capitalism. I knew there were a lot of myths about venture capitalists, but there were actually much more than I thought. Also, it confused me to read that venture capitalists almost always expect unreasonable, outrageous returns on their investments. I would assume that a group of people who professionally invest in businesses should understand that expecting unreasonable returns is not productive. This did not really make sense to me because I did not find this mindset very professional.

If I could ask the author any two questions I would ask him whether or not he would like to be an entrepreneur, and I would ask him if he would ever like to be a venture capitalist? I would hope that he would elaborate on these two questions, and I think it would be interesting to get his point of view. Overall, I did not generally disagree with anything that the author put forward throughout this chapter. I am learning as I read, so I did not generally have any points that I particularly disagreed with.