Quotes from Dave McClure

There's a mathematical way to get success.

My role has been limited to focus on fiduciary obligations to our investors as a general partner of our funds.

Europe is kind of fragmented. Africa is nascent; we've made a few investments, including four in Egypt. I visit 50-60 cities and 20-25 countries a year. The intent is to be a global fund, which takes time and prioritization.

There were never as many big businesses as people were piling money into in the late 90's or early 2000's. This is really a lesson to institutional investors about how much capital the market can absorb, and it's a 10-year adjustment cycle, and we're only beginning to wake up to that.

My personal failures aside, 500 has long supported a diverse community of entrepreneurs including women, minorities, LGTBQ, international, and other overlooked founders.

With great power comes great responsibility. These are platforms with hundreds of millions of people.

I don't know if we're doing the optimal things that we can to try and connect different people on the planet with different points of view and not be so angry at each other.

Everybody in the industry thinks I'm the crazy person.

We think that there's a lot of opportunities in helping improve finding food, delivering food, ordering systems, notifications system, and its a very frequent purchase item for a lot of people.

We have to support the well-being of society.

Everyone has a different definition of risk. Sometimes that creates opportunities as well.

Most firms do two investments a year. They may talk to between 50 and 100 and do a couple, whereas we're talking to thousands and doing several hundred.

Offline, anything is expensive. Online is much cheaper, usually, to do almost anything.

Food tech has been kind of an area that we have been making a number of investments in. Kind of a big boring industry, but a lot of people eat.

It's pretty challenging for large funds to spend the time and energy necessary to get a meaningful return when most of the wins coming out are perhaps below $100 million exits and the ones above are very few and far between.

Design is more important than technology in most consumer applications.

Wait until companies have an initial prototype, have shown that they have the potential to be profitable and have the ability to scale. That's the best time to invest.

The earlier you invest, the higher that attrition rate is because it's compounded. We have a more scientific method of investment.

Usually, what I recommend to entrepreneurs is to focus on telling the problem first, about the customer or the person who has that problem.

Companies that tend to survive are the rebels.

Hottest space that I think is interesting would be education, particularly, like, ages 3-10.

Sometimes, we nerds of technology sort of don't think that the rules necessarily apply to us in the same way, but I think when you produce products that hundreds of millions of people, if not billions of people, are using, we have the same responsibilities as any other person representing the Fourth Estate.

I think you want to show a level of transparency that breeds trust. You don't want to show a level of desperation that breeds concern.

Entrepreneurs usually don't listen to people. Trust them to do their job. Remember, you invested with the understanding the project was likely to fail.