Almost everyone can see the major trends from a mile away. And they take years to play out, providing sufficient opportunity for entrepreneurship and investment. Death of newspapers and transition to online media; transition of software to SaaS and open source; virtualization and clouds; applications over social graphs; political and financial tailwinds behind energy efficiency, are a few opportunities to name. However, I prefer not to chase trends per se, and rather, focus on the sectors that I know and understand. That forces me to accept sector performance as a baseline, and create extraordinary businesses within the sector, to outperform.

Advice to entrepreneurs There are always new areas of opportunity, and now is a great time to start a business. Among many random pieces of questionable advice what I inadvertently dole out to entrepreneurs is: your first business should not be venture-backed, but your second business should be.