Holy Grail lesson number one : hard work pays off.
So it was a bizarre coincidence that the name of the venture capital firm at which I spent most of my career was Quester. I suspect that most entrepreneurs who did business with us thought that Quester was a made up name, but in fact it is a real word, even if its obscurity only secures it an Oxford English Dictionary place as a footnote to the word 'quest'. I have only seen the real word 'quester' used in one context - that of Holy Grail literary criticism, and most notably a seminal work written by Jessie Weston in 1919 called From Ritual to Romance, which inspired The Waste Land - TS Eliot's, that is, not Simon Acland's.
Holy Grail lesson number two : life has a strange habit of going round in circles.
I remember one occasion at Quester when against my colleagues' better judgement, and doubtless to their considerable embarrassment, I used a Holy Grail theme for one of our Limited Partners' annual investor meetings. It made for what I thought was quite an entertaining Powerpoint presentation, with our less successful investments represented as Monty Pythonesque knights scattered in dead heaps across the field of battle, and that elusive home run investment as the so far unachieved Holy Grail. Unfortunately, this being a 2001 vintage fund, the quest continues.
Holy Grail lesson number three : don't let your enthusiasm carry you away.
You may have detected from the content of this article that I seem to enjoy more holding forth about my novels than about my business book - wholly inappropriate you might well think in what is after all a business magazine. But there is a lesson for entrepreneurs in there too. You see, I own 100% of the equity in my fiction. The Waste Land and The Flowers of Evil are published by that well known international imprint Charlwood Books (sole proprietor a certain Simon Acland). They are my babies. I am responsible for writing, design, production, marketing, everything. 100% of the profits are mine (or in fact, the economics of small scale publishing being what they are, 100% of the losses). Angels, Dragons and Vultures, on the other hand, is published by an excellent specialist business publisher, Nicholas Brealey Publishing. As I result I no longer know what equity I own in that book. In some circumstances my royalty is 10% of the cover price. But if the publisher sells the book at a discount of more than 50%, my royalty 10% of the actual price. Foreign rights deliver 7.5%, ebooks 15%. But at the moment, because I have not yet earned back my (very modest) advance, I own absolutely nothing. It is like a liquidation preference in a bad venture capital deal. So is it surprising that I am motivated more to promote my novels, and that as here I shamelessly seize any opportunity for an outrageous book plug?
Holy Grail lesson number four : the deal you do has a major impact on your motivation.
So I am going to continue to bang on about the Holy Grail. But what exactly is it? Often it is pictured as a chalice - the cup used by Christ at the Last Supper, or to catch His blood on the Cross. That's what it turns out to be in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, for example. In the Da Vinci Code, and in the earlier Holy Blood and Holy Grail to which the later book's plot has an uncanny resemblance, the Holy Grail is the bloodline of Jesus Christ - the 'san graal' becomes the 'sang real', the 'royal blood'. In my Waste Land and Flowers of Evil it is different again, and you will have to read them to find out what. But actually the word 'graal' in medieval French means a large platter, not a chalice. It is the sort of dish on which a choice salmon, a wild boar, or a roasted swan might have been served in the twelfth century. In the very first grail poem, the Roman de Perceval written by Chrétien de Troyes around 1180, the grail is not associated with Jesus at all. It is magical, certainly, and precious, but seems to be more like a Celtic cornucopia as it is paraded through the castle of the wounded Fisher King to feed his father. Perceval, as he sits there watching the grail procession, is completely confused as to what it might be and fails to ask the questions which might solve the mystery, cure the Fisher King, and restore the waste land around his castle to its previous fertility (yes, that is where much of the imagery for TS Eliot's poem derives). But in the Roman de Perceval the mystery is unresolved because Chrétien de Troyes died before he finished writing it.
In spite - or perhaps because - of being unfinished, the Roman de Perceval was one of the most popular romances of its day. (Some might say that the Da Vinci Code would have been a better book without its limp ending; it could certainly hardly have been worse unfinished.) Many authors took Chrétien de Troyes's story, adapted it and added their own conclusions. In most versions the Christian element of the story is strengthened and the grail does morph into a chalice, but in a German version it becomes a magical stone. Generally, however, the knights who are questing for it are not quite sure what it is, nor where to find it, nor how to behave along the way. Then Sir Galahad, the perfect knight, appears in an aura of Cistercian certainty in the Queste del Saint Graal, with a much clearer idea of what he is looking for and why, and as a result achieves the quest.
And this is my fifth and final Holy Grail lesson. To me, the characteristic that differentiates really good investors from the rest - and really successful entrepreneurs from those who do less well - is that absolute clarity and understanding of their objective. Reacting to an investment opportunity is one thing; working out your strategy, knowing what you want to back and going after it relentlessly is on another plain, and what really differentiates the tier ones from the rest.
Here endeth the lessons of the Holy Grail.
