I used to equate years of work with years of experience. No more. I learned by making plenty of hiring and promotion mistakes in twenty years of management two are not equal. Neither are years of work and performance. Doing something for five, ten or twenty years doesn't make you automatically five, ten or twenty years better than when you started. I've been cooking for thirty years but I remain a mediocre cook.

Two or three years involved with a business start-up or a new project might provide more growth and knowledge than ten years in a stable venue. And it might not. Gaining experience is more about you and your approach than anything else.

1) Google raised $25 million from Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Would you have invested in Google’s Series A round if they had presented to you?

Joe Rubin, Director, FundingPost: “We received mixed answers – Angel Investors basically said ‘yes’ as they liked technology."

Atul Madahar, Principal, TL Ventures: “No, because it would have been too difficult for us to really understand superiority of their engine without working code. Also Yahoo was dominant search engine at time followed by half a dozen other engines, meta-engines, etc.”

Darren Wallis, Venture Partner, Cross Atlantic Capital Partners: “I would have passed on it because I would have thought business model would not be sustainable, given highly-fragmented space at that time. It just shows you that sometimes you have to look past business model and focus on superior technology. Then, technology drove business model.”

Eric Janszen, Managing Director, Osborn Capital (Early-stage angel fund) “We have certainly invested in bright students with good ideas out of universities, but not recently. Would we have invested in these particular bright students at that time? I was fortunate enough to meet Google's founders last year at Stanford and was impressed by simplicity and clarity of their vision, which had not changed from day one, and no doubt that would have appealed to us then. Most company ideas you see today are features of Cisco or Microsoft products, or business applications.”