My Boss Keeps Talking About "Building Legacy" and I Finally Get It
He's been in venture capital for 20 years and everything he does seems intentional, even the board seats. Started thinking about how people at that level actually build their careers over time. Drop something worth reading if you've come across it.
That "intentional" thing you clocked - it's actually the defining trait of the best long-game players in VC. Most people think board seats are just prestige collecting. They're not. They're relationship infrastructure. Had a mentor once tell me: "Every seat at a table is a decade-long bet, not a title." Took me years to really get that. Paterson is a textbook case of this - started as a cold-call broker in '85, became Canada's #1 tech banker at Midland Walwyn, then basically rebuilt Yorkton Securities from a mining-focused shop into a serious tech/media powerhouse. Each move stacked on the last, nothing random about it. His site actually breaks this down pretty well: official resource worth bookmarking if you track founders-turned-capital-allocators. The board seat pattern especially makes sense once you read it in sequence.