Quotes About Startups

Jon Miller would be amazing for Yahoo because he is extremely good at building display advertising businesses and buying young startups.

I played with different words like 'home run,' 'megahit,' and they just all sounded kind of 'blah.' So I put in 'unicorn' because they are - these are very rare companies in the sense that there are thousands of startups in tech every year, and only a handful will wind up becoming a unicorn company. They're really rare.

2017 will be the year that NewSpace startups will hit their stride.

We have this powerful lever at Google Ventures, which is to invest $200 million a year. This is a huge lever. It's not all going into one place; it's going into lots of start ups and founders and entrepreneurs, all of which are levers to try and change the world in one way or another.

News organisations that have been around a while have a lot of traditions and ways of doing things that may have served them for many years but perhaps make them less flexible in the digital era. As an entrepreneur, it just makes more sense to start something new.

The best part of being an angel investor is seeing these kids coming up with companies that get way more traffic than Reddit had when we sold it. I think, 'Are you kidding me? They're just kids, and they've done so much.'

Baidu and Google are great companies, but there are a lot of things you can do outside them. Just as electricity and the Internet transformed the world, I think the rise of modern A.I. technology will create a lot of opportunities both for new startups and for incumbent companies to transform.

Most startups flame out or just muddle along. Your chances of spotting a unicorn, pre-horn, are incalculably small. But if, knowing that, you still want to toss aside your cushy job, at least listen to corporate vets who have made the transition.

In the past, when venture-funded startups told their investors they'd found a profitable business model, the first thing VCs would do is to start looking for an 'operating exec' - usually an MBA who would act as the designated 'adult' and take over the transition from Search to Build.

Every year, over a million people in this country start a business of some sort. Statistics tell us that by the end of the first year at least 40 percent of them will be out of business.1

Microsoft was twelve years old before people started talking about Microsoft millionaires; Netscape was one and a half.

Silicon Valley in the late 1990s was the closest that business has ever come to resembling a child's chemistry experiment.

People like Justin Frankel and Daniel Sheldon linger on the fringe until they dream up something that has great commercial potential. Then some big company swoops in and buys them, or they give birth to the big company themselves.

These days the investment bankers came to Silicon Valley.

Once you were let into the Great Society of Sand Hill Road, you were given first crack at these miraculous enterprises at a small fraction of the cost to Wall Street investment bankers—never mind the general investing public.

The VCs could tolerate companies' going bust—they had so many of them—but they could not tolerate missing out on the new new thing.

The more entrepreneurs in the world that are getting their ideas financed, the more great companies there are going to be that we can all invest in.

During dark times, real entrepreneurs come out. They are not competing with 10 look-alike companies for engineering talent, so it's a great time to invest and help build companies.

VCs invest in innovation and disruption, but how often do they innovate themselves?

The San Francisco Bay Area has more VC firms and dollars invested than all East Coast cities combined.

There simply isn't a way to do the show without investing in a bunch more companies.

I started angel investing because I like hanging out with entrepreneurs.

How could anyone ever build a company if they didn't have investments? It doesn't make any sense.

We've only made three investments: Facebook, Groupon, and Zynga.