How can one who is interested in VC (from the investor perspective) learn the rudiments? What are the best books, blogs, courses, etc?
1) find people who will give you their hard earned money to invest. 2) invest said money in startups
Now remember simple doesn’t mean easy. Also in this case it “not easy” also doesn’t mean meritocratic either.
For eg.
1) nobody will give you their money (at least the first time) unless you can signal successfully you are capable of convincing them that you can do a great job at investing their money and potentially giving back a great return. This is similar to judging startups ideas and their founders in their early stages. There is nothing to judge so early, so people (typically) use the founders education institutions as a proxy. If you have something different that you can use to signal and that is a generally acceptable proxy that works too. Until you have a good exit you will need to win the signaling game. Just like repeat founders once you have once success this becomes your new signal replacing the old one. Repeat founders are easier to back than virgin founders.
Look at existing VCs in their early careers and you will see a pattern - either they were already known due to domain expertise (eg: Marc Andreessen etc ) or unknown till first success and then blew up (eg chris sacca etc). I am sure the latter did have to “work hard” until they had their first success.
It’s a lot of posturing in a sea of real and wannabe intellectuals. Sometime the posturing is supported by substance sometimes it’s not and in those cases you fake it till you make it.
2)MD/Partner - Either need to have been a senior executive at a known tech company or C-level at a successful exit startup.
I would say that yeah "Principal told me to do this so I need to get it done" is a good starting point, although for funds I'm familiar with (in Europe) it's a bit more structured than that.