This time around, we’re thinking about cloud computing as investors rather than entrepreneurs. On his blog, Ben walks through why we invested in Okta, our first cloud investment. We couldn’t be more excited.

When I introduced our venture firm on this blog in July, I wrote extensively about the types of entrepreneurs and companies we want to fund: technical founders, brilliant and motivated entrepreneurs, product-focused companies, and so on. I got widespread head nods on most of the criteria.

But many people were skeptical about the "founder-as-CEO" filter. To express their skepticism, people would ask me some variant of this central question: "shouldn't the founding CEO just get the company jump started, then recruit a professional CEO to drive once the company is up and running?" 

While we agree that startup CEOs and "grow the company" CEOs need dramatically different skill sets (a point Ben hinted at in his last blog post), we wanted lay out our thinking on why we prefer funding startups whose founding CEO plans to run the company for a good long time. Cue the hip hop.

My partner Ben and I have been active angel investors for years and now full-time venture capitalists for 9 months. But prior to that (and for most our lives), we've been entrepreneurs.

Now that we've sat on both sides of the table—and have spent more time with other venture capitalists—my partner Ben has a few observations to share about what he likes and dislikes about what some VCs do. Mostly what he dislikes. Though to be fair, he has recommendations for behavior he'd like to see instead, so it's not just a rant.

And yes, there's a quote from a rap artist (Dr. Dre, to be precise).