Mark Leslie has seen the entrepreneur's life from many angles. As the founding CEO and long-time board member of Veritas Software, he experienced first-hand the long trajectory of a startup that goes public, becomes a market leader, then gets acquired (by Symantec). He's also been a successful investor, with early stakes in storage switch maker Brocade Communications and in VMWare, the virtualization software pioneer which was sold to EMC in early 2004, then spun out of the storage giant last month in the biggest tech IPO since Google. As an adjunct professor at Stanford University, Mark also teaches entrepreneurship. Vator caught up with him in San Francisco, where he was speaking on a panel about his latest investment, Xsigo Systems. In this piece, he explains the idea of "authenticity," which he calls a key component of entrepreneurial success, and gives advice on how to pitch venture capital firms, whom he invests with. His firm, Leslie Ventures, isn't a VC shop and doesn't invest directly in startups.