Quotes About Venture Capital

I hear so many startups talking about how they can raise VC instead of questioning whether they need it in the first place.

With tech startups, it's all loose-goosie. You raise money as you go, often from friends, family and investors.

It's not that Twitter isn't successful, it just isn't successful enough to justify all the money investors have pumped into it.

Rejecting the rules of late-stage tech-bubble venture-capital madness is a better, more resilient, and durable approach to business in a digital landscape. Who better to affirm this than one of the digital industry's most trusted news and analysis sources, PandoDaily.

When the venture capital industry invests, it's usually because they sense there is money in them hills. And often it takes a high-profile winner to wake everyone up in the category. SpaceX is that company.

Seed investing is the status symbol of Silicon Valley. Most people don't want Ferraris, they want a winning seed investment.

I delivered lectures, and I was also a consultant for international companies in finance, both private equity and big venture capital funds.

We have co-opted seed funds. You know, Y Combinator, that was completely our money. We have secret handshakes with a whole bunch of people. Very dangerous, because word gets out that so-and-so's money is Sequoia's money, that would not be a good thing.

My philosophy, in a nutshell, is to wipe out the greatest amount of risk with the least amount of money.

Sometimes people think Y Combinator has big ideas about themes. But really, we just fund the best startups.

Whatever the potential pitfalls, banks are increasingly enthusiastic about venture capital, particularly in new companies with strong prospects in fields like health care and technology.

Tom Perkins's dictums: you succeed in venture capital by backing the right deals, not by haggling over valuations.

Thus, even though VC-backed firms accounted for 47 percent of IPOs, they accounted for 76 percent of the market value at the end of the study. They also accounted for fully 89 percent of R&D spending.[35

Finance is critical. If sufficient investment is made in infrastructure and venture capital is made available, there will be a big improvement in the situation.

Any time we would talk to another VC, our investors would talk him out of it: 'This is not a good company'... So we were really stuck with our existing investors for the next round.

I've been doing a hybrid of investing and entrepreneurship, which I think initially I wasn't set out to do. But I realized it fit my personality.

You know what works in venture capital? A group of incredibly smart, connected people who have the financial wherewithal and risk appetite to make multi-million dollar bets on unproven ideas and inexperienced founders. People who can make decisions quickly, and who spend their time trying to help entrepreneurs make the most of that cash.

Venture capital is unscalable. Production equals the time each partner has.

As one of my mentors, the venture capital investor Shawn Carolan, put it, "Startups don't starve; they drown." There are always a zillion new ideas about how to make the product better floating around, but the hard truth is that most of those ideas make a difference only at the margins. They are mere optimizations. Startups have to focus on the big experiments that lead to validated learning.

Techstars is truly global; you'll see us continue to expand all our programs worldwide, including accelerators, our venture capital, as well as the UP Global programs including Startup Weekend, Startup Next, Startup Digest, etc.

For politicians who worry about technology's geopolitical impact, it's tempting to get the government directly involved in subsidizing venture capital. But this is a mistake. In most cases, four simple steps will pay off more. Encourage limited partnerships. Encourage stock options. Invest in scientific education and research. Think globally.

The strategy followed by privatization's advocates is, first, to discredit welfare functions as "socialism" and then either to sell those functions to a private bidder or to privatize a particular program. A traditional governmental function, such as education, is in process of being redefined, from a promise to make education accessible to all to an investment opportunity for venture capital.12

Hurley, Chen, and Karim cobbled together a rough beta for a service that would correct these deficiencies, raised less than $ 10 million in venture capital, hired about two dozen people, and launched YouTube, a website that utterly transformed the way video information is shared online. Within sixteen months of the company's founding, the service was streaming more than 30 million videos a day. Within two years, YouTube was one of the top-ten most visited sites on the Web.

One role of government is to go where venture capital won't. In the Civil War, you had a president pay the railroads $16,000 for every mile of track they laid. You had Eisenhower invest $25 million in a defense agency called ARPA that came up with a thing that became the internet.