This resonates with me big time. My last couple of years as a VC I would sit in first meetings with entrepreneurs and know in 5 minutes that I wasn’t interested but didn’t have the balls to cut it short by saying “hey this isn’t for me and I don’t want to waste your time”. I wish I did, it would have saved a lot of needless meetings watching the minutes tick by. Having said that, I only recently realized that the reason all those meetings were so boring to me is that I was only interested in funding and pursuing one kind of business, what I am doing now, but to do that from the perch of being the venture investor would still have been unfulfilling. For all the perks and privilege that venture capital affords those who are fortunate enough to call that their profession, it is still one step removed from the raw success and failures that businesses experience.

MercuryNews.com | 12/12/2006 | Some venture capitalists switching sides:

However, the biggest plus, say these Web entrepreneurs — each of whom hopes as much as the next company founder to strike it rich — is knowing what they’ll do differently if they return to venture capital. “I used to sit and nod and think I could fake my way through another meeting with someone,” said the founder of the online advertising start-up. “As an entrepreneur, I now see you can instantly recognize who doesn’t get it, or care.”