Good entrepreneurs are born, not taught to become one: Jeffrey Paine

Entrepreneurship can be taught, but not all entrepreneurs will be good founders, says Jeffrey Paine, General Partner at Golden Gate Ventures and Director at Founder Institute.

Talking to Winning Ways, he said that a lot of Ivy League schools do talk about training enterpreneurs and that is possible, but those are not the good or top ones. The real enterepreneurs are born with the quality and at Founder Institute the aim is to identify them.

“Training an enterpreneur is more about guiding them and helping them in what they want to do, rather than teaching them the basics of doing business,” he said.

Jeffrey Paine is an entrepreneur and venture capitalist. He is a General Partner at Golden Gate Ventures and a director of The Founder Institute. Since 2010, the Founder Institute in Singapore has graduated over 60 companies. He is also a director at Battle Ventures, a venture advisory firm.

In late 2011, Jeffrey co-founded with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs Vinnie Lauria and Paul Bragiel a $10 million seed venture fund to invest in early-stage technology companies in Southeast Asia. The inaugural fund drew commitments from angel investors in Silicon Valley and Asia, especially Japan.

Golden Gate Ventures primarily focusses on early stage funding — seed as well as Series A. According to Jeffrey, this also means that one of the critical aspects they look out for is the DNA of the founding team and how well they work together.

Jeffrey is currently an investor and advisor to Redmart, Tradegecko, Coda Payments, AtticTV, and Flutterscape/monoco and mentor at JFDI Asia, Founder Institute, and Chinaccelerator. He is a graduate of the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business.

For the complete interview watch the video.