Bloomberg Beta

“So we actually try to avoid talking about AI. And the reason is AI has come to mean both the cluster of all those techniques and the Like replicating human intelligence with something that feels humanoid and, you know, is out to get you like in Ex Machina or s…”

“We don't invest in the space of things that serve people's personal lives, but if I did, I think services for the elderly are the number one untapped opportunity, and just wait till we have more sixty-five-year-old tech founders, because they'll see the opport…”

“When I give people a term sheet, I say, go shop it. It's not going to explode. I only want you to work with us because we're the best choice for you, not because I've put you under some time pressure.”

“Yes, I think machine intelligence will eat software. While software is eating the world.”

“We published our manual to GitHub and released it under an open source license”

“Any one person says yes on our team we do a deal.”

“If what you're talking about is, I guess I'd call them method-only companies, you know, some technology that you think can be applied to a wide variety of situations, and you're not really building around any one of them, then yes, then I do think that is aqua…”

“If we thought that there was a better alternative than the founder for the business, we'd tell the person that. And then if they said, no, no, no, thanks. That's nice. That's your opinion, but I'm going to keep going. Generally, we would back them to keep goin…”

“The best investment decisions were always very, very controversial.”

“In our firm at least, we've made the decision that anyone can say yes.”

“The more data you get, the more valuable it is actually for the SaaS company, right? And so all the normal units of measure around how much you should charge are, don't really apply and don't entirely make sense.”

“Groups are really good at Getting new diverse points of view and new bits of information. And groups are actually also really good at doing complex coordinated tasks. Groups are uniquely bad at making interesting decisions.”

“Now, what's interesting, when we first started talking about machine learning three years ago, I think it was still seen as something that only tech companies were interested in, and what's changed over the last three years is that now everyone's interested. T…”

“There's going to be something, some similar insight and some similar buzzword about the separation of models and the ability to share insights of models between companies while at the same time not actually sharing data.”

“If you go on our website, you can see our long form deal documents and the questions that we ask in diligence.”

“So for us, it goes back again to the founder as customer. So our core model is own what we want to own the day we invest.”

“Our offers never explode, and we encourage founders to go shop our offers.”

“We are today announcing our Third fund. And the exciting news is that it is precisely the same as the previous two ventures, a funny occupation where you get to like say, hooray every couple of years when you keep doing exactly what you've been doing. But when…”

“And it's turned into this advice-giving, checking-in governance body, and at the stage at which we invest, where founders are making critical decisions daily, the idea of meeting once every month, or two months, or three months, and doing a PowerPoint presenta…”

“The founder financial situation is one of the most personal financial situation is one of the most important and under discussed aspects of the life of a company, because it's going to drive so much decision making.”

“We're very happy to lose deals on price. We need to be able to be deeply enough enmeshed financially with the winning companies to That we make enough to make up for all of the cases where we take risk and companies don't work out.”

“We did an analysis looking at the top company performers. And what you see is that since the era that seed funds have existed and who funded them at the seed. And what you see is that some of them were funded by seed funds, first round true others funded some …”

“The way it works is your fund has a strategy and you say to yourself, do I want to invest in this company? And if I want to invest in this company, then I have a check size. And the check size is usually determined by the fund size, because again, back to our …”

“The competitive lanes issue, which is if I back you, I'm not going to back your competitors. And so that means that every time we write a check, we're giving up the opportunity cost of serving another customer and of backing other companies in that space.”

“In our first check, We invest where anybody can say yes, and that's designed to produce good accountability and independent decision-making and avoid groupthink. But the issue with the follow-on checks is then you're serving that company, you become emotionall…”

“And when we lose on a two or three X price difference often because again, valuation is a function of fund size.”

“There's a reason we only ask for customer calls at the end of the process. Once we really already have strong conviction, because that's a very delicate, sensitive thing.”

“The returns we earn go to Bloomberg philanthropies, and that means they go to an organization whose mission it is to help improve the lives of people around the world and fight guns and fight climate change and fight for education”