But even in Silicon Valley, where it's long been said that nerds rule, Herrod's found that being able to understand and offer advice on the technical challenges startups face has given him an edge over other venture capitalists. His technical acumen and experience has helped him establish a rapport with the companies' founders and get into deals, he told Business Insider in a recent interview.
But beyond his degrees and titles, he has also plenty of practical experience. At VMware, he learned how to build a large technical team as he helped the company grow its engineering staff from 20 people to 2,000. As its CTO, he learned how to guide VMware's developers to anticipate problems years in advance and to make sure they assigned particular issues to the engineers and groups that were best suited to tackle them.
At that stage, the companies are "almost always [just] a technical team and a general idea," he said. "AI gets a ton of undue hype," he said. "But also there's a lot of real stuff going on there. And so being able to separate those two and hope the investment's a good one has been a big focus."Real AI essentially involves computing systems learning from patterns, experiences, or examples and applying that understanding to future problems, Herrod said.