This article is adapted from an interview on Our Future: Looking Beyond with Michael Sikand, the business podcast for young people. Episode 5 releases on Friday morning and will appear in the new podcasts section of Santa Cruz Works.

G. Craig Vachon is a Santa-Cruz based entrepreneur-investor and author of best-selling  spy thriller, The Knucklehead of Silicon Valley. He is Managing Director at Chowdahead Growth Fund and Senior Partner at NextStage. 

So why does Vachon's growth fund have a goofy name like Chowdahead instead of some sleek, prestigious Silicon Valley nomenclature? 

“I was a little bit intimidated by some of the Sand Hill folks who came up with names like Atlas, and A16Z, and Sequoia. These are big powerful names and I’m just this little knucklehead, or more appropriately, chowdahead” said Vachon. 

Instead of referring to himself as a venture capitalist, Vachon describes being an “entrepreneur-investor”. When he graduated from Emerson College in 1987, he couldn’t find a job. So he started his own company and then sold it to the Japanese.  

Vachon’s global experience did not end in his twenties. He is a senior partner at a private equity firm in Paris called Next Stage Partners, and his career in international business compelled him to write his first novel The Knucklehead of Silicon Valley. But why did he undertake the journey of penning a spy-thriller book?

“I always believed that you should be curious enough to do things that you don’t know how to do. One of those things was to write a novel” said Vachon. “I thought it would be a lot fun to take some of the stories of my career and kind of weave a narrative arc around them”. 

Vachon’s life is channeled through protagonist Ralph, a friendly, goofy, and intellectually curious, middle-aged venture capitalist who stumbles into a nefarious business venture designed to monetize a tool that tracks when students learn things (cough, cough Cambridge Analytica). 

When asked how much of the book's content is fact, Vachon is quick to say that “80-90% of it comes from actual events”. So if you ever find Vachon at a bar, you’re likely to be finishing your third drink before he even gets to the juicy stuff. 

There is no shortage of business pitches in Vachon’s novel that infringe upon consumer privacy. Its a topic he is very passionate about, as he was one of the first investors and team members at AnchorFree, a virtual private network company.

In fact, Vachon gave a Ted Talk in 2012 on the importance of internet privacy, which supposedly garnered over 650,000 views before Google took it down for “terms of service violations”. The video is back up on Youtube but commands only a fraction of its original views. 

When asked about how we should go about regulating data collection business models, Vachon points to the European Union’s GDPR policies, which guarantee digital consumers a “right to be forgotten,” and calls that “a great step”. 

Vachon also had some short and sweet advice for young people who want to win in the world of business. 

“Be curious and be persistent”. 

To hear Vachon’s wild story, listen to the full podcast episode when it debuts on Friday. Listeners who follow and share the @ourfuturepodcast on their Instagram story are automatically entered into a raffle to win one of three free copies of the Knucklehead of Silicon Valley.