investor

“Entrepreneurs, before they take money from someone, should ask as many questions and do as, and should do as much diligence as the investors do on the entrepreneurs. It's a bi-directional relationship. It should never be unidirectional.”

“So I'd say as an entrepreneur, you have a lot more empathy for your investors, and you really get to the point where you want to You know, do well by them, and that, that becomes a very, very high priority, if not your top priority.”

“Historically, venture capital funds have returned to their investors net about 25 to 30%.”

“A lot of investors are Really screw up companies because they sit there thinking they know everything when they don't.”

“If someone just keeps telling you it's interesting, that is, of course, the word of death. Interesting means they're not interested.”

“Everyone's going to tell you, every investor's going to tell you how helpful they're going to be. They're going to introduce you to everyone in the world that you want to meet and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's really simple. You say, okay, that's fant…”

“I would include success stories. So by the way, we've signed, you know three more clients and we've had a real good new hire. To make it really worth the while for the investor to think, ah, you know, even if I wasn't so excited the first time sort of to get r…”

“While for you, the business is like, The one thing for the investor, it's probably one of five or 10 things they're currently looking at.”

“Once you've signed, once an investor has invested in your company, you can't get rid of them. You are based, you're really committed. It's almost like getting married. So you want to look for someone with personal compatibility with you.”

“Let's say you're a technical co-founder, you know a lot about the space you're tackling from a technical standpoint, but you've never run revenue before, you've never managed a sales team before or you need help on the commercial side. Well, you probably want …”

“If you have to convince an investor how, like, that the market is big enough, they're probably not going to do it is kind of my notion.”

“But when you're launching a, an incubator or a studio that, in essence, holds equity in various degrees of a whole portfolio of different companies, it's a very different entity. So honestly, one of the most challenging parts has been Conveying the strategy an…”

“When you get hot, it's like investors are losing their minds a little bit. It's like you're the most beautiful girl on the dance floor and everyone wants to dance with you.”

“I wouldn't talk to so many investors. I would look, make a list first look what investors really can add value to your company. Also look for investors that that, that, that, that give you a good feeling personally, so it's not only about ratio, it's also it's…”

“Investors often pay more for serial entrepreneurs, people who have been through kind of ups and downs, hiring, firing you know, the pains of having to Having to wind a company down.”

“Everyone's always looking for great opportunities, and if you're connecting someone with an opportunity that's going to be, you know, fulfilling for them you know, help them increase their investment portfolio and is a good match, you know, that feels great, a…”

“At the end of the day, the investors want to be investing in the next Google, the next Airbnb, the next Facebook, and if they believe that this company is going to be that, then They should want to put their money in at pretty much any price, because it's a sl…”

“Ultimately, anyone who puts money in your company, you should look at them as an advisor who's incentivized now, because their money's in it.”

“If you raise, you know, say, say you're, you know, you just launched your product, and you have, you know, four or five months of data, and it all looks positive, but it's all limited and you raise a lot of money, The expectations for growth are, from the, fro…”

“I care less about investors that are generally cool, Right? And I care more about investors that can help us generate more revenue.”

“Like, any investor who doesn't like science fiction, I think, should not be in the investing game.”

“When entrepreneurs in a meeting ask us, you know, what value do we add? My initial response is always, investors don't add value, and that's what we'll promise you.”

“So I think as a, as an investor, your job is to avoid taking a hard stance on anything that isn't, that is potentially more noise than signal. Because you, what you're looking for are outliers.”

“Take it seriously because in, in my mind it's even more serious than marriage. You know, you are really going to be working together in the long term, so, so make sure you get along well, not just you know, from an intellectual level, but really at somewhat of…”

“Most investors look for something on the order of a three X money on money return, in a fund and a 15 to 20% IRR net to them, net of fees, net of carry, net of any compensation to the venture capitalist return to the investor. And if you can't achieve those me…”

“Probably the most important thing any investor can do is attract follow-on capital for their investments.”

“Make sure that the founder can speak ad nauseum about marketplace dynamics. They don't, if they can't, then it's not worth it, because marketplaces are difficult enough as it is to execute. They have to be thinking about those issues from the very beginning.”

“In an acqui-hire, the acquiring company, they don't care about the investors, right? They only care about retaining the employees. Therefore any kind of cash compensation that's going towards the acquisition is going to be earmarked for the employees, and the …”

“Where I do think it plays is in the round, whether you call it institutional seed, or seed plus, or just seed, and maybe what I'm doing is pre-seed, whatever the case, this two to three million dollar round that sometimes happens before a series A, I think tha…”

“One of the big differences between being a founder operator versus being an investor is as an investor, you do lots of things, but ultimately, your feedback loop is several years long”

“So I think, you know, it's good to know who the investors are that might be interested in your business, but I wouldn't share too much information personally. I would really generate that allure of, you know, you're doing something cool and interesting and, yo…”

“One of the big lessons that I've learned around what makes a good board member is having as much operation experience as you can, because investors can sort of say, well, here's what we've seen other companies do. Here are some trends and here's some data. And…”

“You want to have representation that's commiserate with what the end markets are. And so from a financial and business sense, a business perspective, it makes sense to have a diverse set of investors.”

“When an operator approaches a mountain in his path, his immediate thought is like, how do I scale it or tunnel through it or walk around it? But the presence of the mountain is an immediate challenge that an operator's mind starts spinning on how to solve that…”

“When 70 to eight percent of those investors ask me, how will you win this male-dominated industry as a woman, it's very, very hard not to think there might be something wrong with you.”

“When we talked to investors, we found that they all basically fell into one of two buckets. Either you had the people who really cared about the why, or, you know, what are traditionally called impact investors, but who knew basically nothing about technology …”

“There are so many LIDAR companies, and there's, more importantly, there's so many investors who don't really have the competency to understand which LIDAR innovations are meaningful, and really what it even takes to make a LIDAR company successful, right?”

“You know, I think one of the most frustrating things is that the companies that get the most funding aren't the companies I wish got the most funding. I work with a lot of really interesting, like biotech companies, people working on some really interesting pr…”

“I started off by saying to investors, let me tell you the top 10 reasons you're not going to want to back us. And if you still want to talk after that, we will, but then we won't waste time. And 95% of investors thanked me and said, I don't want to meet.”

“The two biggest lies around startups are founders saying, I don't care about the valuation and investors saying, you know, we don't care about control.”

“It's easy to be a great investor, as I said before, that it's easy to be a great investor when things are going up and to the right. When you see someone's true metal is when things are going badly, when things are scary and difficult. And it's important for f…”

“I think there's a big asymmetry in how much diligence investors do to companies versus how much companies do to investors.”

“I think people try to like index way too much for stage specificity”

“If something feels overpriced by a factor of two, and I think it's going to increase by a factor of 2000, that's okay. You know, I always roll my eyes when investors are like, well, I would pay 400, but not four hundred and fifty million dollars for this compa…”

“I basically should not pay any attention whatsoever to whether or not other investors are investing in a company even if they're people that I thought highly of. And that that was like, I think that is the mistake that most investors make is the thing that the…”

“Most investors, I think, make stressful situations worse.”

“We know we can't get the best insights and the best advice. If I'm worried about with each conversation, having to sort of sell them or pitch them on the status of the company or what our next plans are, want to be able to have honest, open discussions about t…”

“A lot of CEOs and entrepreneurs are given bad advice by investors that are based on success biases of other things they've invested in, They're given bad advice by their CEOs who are giving their advice based on the success biases of their own companies.”

“I think that, you know, great investors are helpful when you ask them to be helpful and need them to be helpful, and they dig in and roll up their sleeves with things like recruiting, particularly on areas like recruiting or another area where a CEO may need h…”

“As a founder, the relationship that I'm able to build, the trust, the partnership that we have with the members of our board and with our investors is critical to our success. And making sure that that happens in the same way that it would happen with a female…”

“Investors don't like to say no because they don't like closing the door on potentially good opportunities. So it's really hard to know whether you're in the no camp or the yes camp because you'll always kind of get a maybe unless you push for a no.”

“It's like, do we like each other? Do we agree on the vision? And do we agree on the tactics at a high level? And then from there, it's a lot of nice to have. But I think those three are the core.”

“When I do need help from my investors, I think they helped me just like they would if they had put in two million dollars or five million dollars, even if they've only put in 25 K. So I haven't noticed a difference based on their responsiveness or their willin…”

“I always want to create competition between my investors. I want the folks who have helped me to be recognized, to subtly shame the ones that haven't, and show appreciation for the people who are constantly going out of their way and making introductions and h…”

“What they often get wrong is that it's really not about the size of the market, it's about the size of the problem, and what is the available market for that, and kind of often the most interesting businesses have no market today.”

“I do think a lot of people will be making mistakes on the preemptive side, though, because they're basically investing ahead of time with little data evaluations that aren't merited by the data, and so you either have to be extremely good or extremely lucky, a…”

“What I have seen is that in many cases, when an investor is not as mature or lacks patience, they can really screw up an opportunity because they end up Driving short-term decisions that will stop a company from having a long-term opportunity.”

“I think you can be a really good or really bad investor with either background.”

“You know, ultimately for founders, if you do exactly what you're told to do by your investors and the company fails, you're a failure. If you don't do what they say and it's successful, you're a success. So ultimately the decision is in the hands of the founde…”

“We do talk, and something for investors to note, I think, is everybody knows it, but I think it's important to remind everybody that we talk between us, right? Don't screw entrepreneurs because everybody will know, right?”

“I heard stories about investors who are, of course, board members as well, who kill deals, kill fundraising deals, or M&A, just to maximize, and it's not even material, like, just, you know, because they don't like not getting everything.”

“Find a disagreement with the founder before you invest, because your conflict resolution mode is important, and actually the person's reaction to conflict or to pushback is also important.”

“I do think team members are making early hires are making way more of an investment than investors are because they're investing not just with capital, but their time, their family, their reputation, their resume”

“In today's world, the reality is that your business and your personal lives blend completely into just one person, and so I do think that In your role as investor slash advisor, you are a friend to the founder, and your job is to support the entire person with…”

“I think in many instances, yes. I think founders, with good reason, want a very fast process, and they want to get back to work, and are sometimes inclined, really, just to get the best deal as quickly as they can and get back to work. I would personally advis…”

“And I think for founders, they shouldn't always be raising, but they should only typically meet with investors if they're going to actually give them tangible business value, whether that's intros, customer intros, or prospect intros, recruiting.”

“So both rounds, we didn't bring any investors on the board.”

“And I think at some point along the way, maybe it's series A, series B, the board usually flips over to be controlled by investors.”

“Without sort of soft pitching people throughout a series of meetings and You know, you really don't get a chance to build that relationship and your chances of success are just so much lower. Whereas I think you should just always be building fundraising relat…”

“I think you lose as an investor if you fall back on stereotypes, which is different, I think, from falling back on intuitions.”

“Investors first and foremost should do no harm. And I say that and people think it's kind of funny when I say it, but it's actually true. I've seen so many instances where investors are too opinionated and getting in the way, pushing founders to do things that…”

“First is introductions to people. It's always hard to get to certain decision makers in certain companies, and especially when you're, say, hiring for a new role, as we talked about, particularly helpful if you can say to your investor, hey, who's the best At …”

“If you have to make a hard decision or have a hard conversation with your investor or your investor needs to have a hard conversation with you cannot let the friendship get in the way because this is a business relationship and you need to make sure that you h…”

“I think the number one lesson there was basically nobody knows what they're doing. And that's not just them. That's also me. And I've also met with many investors and many other folks, even folks that worked at companies and nobody really knows what they're do…”

“I highly encourage entrepreneurs to really keep in mind that at this moment in time you know, in the tech ecosystem, investors are on the sell side.”

“Founders often ask their investors, will you do your pro rata at the next round? It's, I think that's a dumb question because if there's a next round that's led by an outside investor, generally people are clamoring for their pro rata. To me, the better questi…”

“Nobody was paying attention to the web space because mobile was the new hotness. So, you know, all the investors, all the companies were kind of like, if you're working on the web, you're wasting your time. You're kind of like building on a dying technology.”

“50% of investors add into a cap table or just a drag factor on time for their founder. And then maybe another 30% are neutral to slightly positive. And then there are stars that actually are transformational to the company”

“We thought it would be easier to close the worst investors. It was actually easier to close the better investors.”

“Investors kind of set the tone. And sometimes the implied conversation there is, what do you need to do? You need to do A, B, and C in order to raise your seed bounce. You need to do D, E, and F to raise your series A. And I think that's just a really wrong wa…”

“We're still doing this today, which is thinking about investors as team members. When you bring in a new Gusti, that's how we call our own team members. When you bring in a new Gusti on board, there's an interview process, right? And there's like a whole lot o…”

“Well, they definitely help with their network introductions and generally just being a cheerleader of what you do on a day to day basis. What maybe people are surprised, or at least my perception of what maybe they're not as helpful with is no one's going to k…”

“And as a CEO, I think having investors who can manage their own emotions is really important. And when things aren't going as well as the company, like, you know, as CEO, right, you're on it. You're paying attention to that very closely. And so I think having …”

“Too many investors that I had come across didn't have real startup operating experience. And I didn't feel like I always got the advice that I could have used at the time I could have used it.”

“I think it comes down to getting the valuable context rather than a specific answer. You know, I think that the best investors or thought partners in general are really those who, if you were to ask them, well, how much should we charge for a product or should…”

“If few investors are interested, if you can cross that hurdle, it creates an incredible moat for you, because you can be the pioneer.”

“I think the high quality investors also understand the fragility of these kinds of things. And so as a result, don't demand this kind of fake work.”

“Investors would be best served to remember that Companies do not exist for their pleasure. Companies exist for people to do their life's work. And when you do decide it's not for you, that it's not about proving that you're right.”

“I'm always amazed at investors who mock other investors for paying up for companies, and I think there's far more shame in losing on price than winning on price, and no one really wants to say that”

“One of the advantages investors have is this bird's eye view where they can help founders identify, you know, the two or three most crucial elements of the business that need to be addressed.”

“I find it misplaced when investors crow about the success of a company as though they were the ones who were in the trenches every day. I think investors can have a big influence sometimes for the better in the outcome of a company. But there's a reason we hav…”

“You're not fully, completely aligned with your investors ever, no matter what model you have.”

“And so a lot of markets, when people think, oh, that's new, it's interesting, that's actually not when you make the most money as an investor. You often make the most money in the second or third inning or later of a market, because all of a sudden the market …”

“Really interview the person you're working with. These people are going to be with you forever. You should really want to get to know them, and it doesn't mean you get to know them by telling them about your business. Ask them about theirs. Ask them about thei…”

“You're seeing the diversity of investors increasing as well. The investing gap among underrepresented minorities shrinking.”

“I think the biggest misconception about risk is that, this is going to be kind of weird, is people spend a lot of time trying to calculate their risk, but they don't think enough about whether they actually... Have the expected value, right? Like, are they win…”

“When you hear a pitch, you get excited about what you would do with this idea. And that's a really shitty way to make investments because you're not going to do anything with this idea. You got to try to figure out what they're going to do with this idea.”

“I think the bigger challenge today, to be honest with you, Harry, is less around price. It's more on how quickly decisions are having to get made, and I think that, I think, might have, you know, negative implications, not just for investors, but also for foun…”

“Some of the input you're getting is really selfish by the investors from their perspective, but not good for the company.”

“Because if I hire an executive and they don't work out, I can fire them. But if I bring on an investor and they suck, you can't really like fire someone who owns 10% of your company.”

“Now I feel like the new meta for investors is to build a personal brand on Twitter. And the way you do that is the tweet storms. That's a classic example of a optimal status seeking tactic within Twitter that has been adopted by the universe of players.”

“Obviously, it means that when you present this data to investors in your next round, you, like, need to show it clearly. You have probably two different line items, and it's clear that those different types of revenue have different margins. Maybe one is recur…”

“To investors who are up and coming, I think you need to consistently remind other investors of how you're helpful. So, you know, people are like, you know, Saka, you're self-promotional. I'm like, fuck yeah, I am. Like, that's part of the job is I have to cont…”

“I basically Got burnt out. Told my investors, hey, thanks, but no thanks. Here's what little money we have left. You can all have it back.”

“Right now there is a lack of high quality entrepreneurs and there's an excess of capital. And so people, investors are trying to fund whatever they can.”

“And we went so many times against what our investors thought we should do.”

“At a high level, if you project this out again, over five to 10 year plus timescale, the investors who are more participatory in these networks that can actively get involved natively with these technologies are going to be the ones that win.”

“When you release a podcast with a founder, you should also send it to every investor on their cap table. They are incentivized to share it. They have shares in the company. You should also send it to their board. They have a deep relationship with the founder.…”

“But the reality is, which we didn't know at the time, is that They are, they actually speculating and they are betting that you will win, not that you had already won.”

“I'm not being a good friend to the founder if I'm blowing smoke up their ass in the boardroom, and then the second they walk out of the boardroom, all the investors have a different conversation. Right? So I think that being willing to tell the truth as I woul…”

“Usually the best board members, not, not necessarily investors, right, but the best board members are ones who, Really know the sector that the company is, and know people in that sector really well, such that they can easily connect said company with other pe…”

“A lot of us as investors, for the most part, we can't do what entrepreneurs do. We choose not to do what entrepreneurs do.”

“It's literally harder to remove an investor than it is to get divorced.”

“They go to their priority names first. Do not do this. Your pitch both in delivery, style, and messaging will improve so much with each meeting. Start with a couple of investors where, respectfully, you would not be so sad if they said no.”

“Most investors, investors don't realize, like, they're not gonna regret the upside if they put money in their pocket, but if they don't take the upside and things go away, they're gonna have a lot of regret.”

“And so people care about the most recent data points, not the oldest data points. And you got to show them that.”

“Everyone in the ecosystem is incentivized and able to maintain sort of pretend valuations. Meaning the investors want to keep their marks where they are. Their LPs actually want them to keep their marks where they are because they don't want to look bad. The c…”

“One 70 to 500, like, they took away the, you know, you're on the tightrope, and all of a sudden you look down, and they're, like, pulling the mats away, like, the safety net is being pulled away, because, and when we did, like, when we had that issue come up, …”

“With every stock position that you have, if you're any kind of investor, you either, you should either be a buyer or a seller of that position. Right. And if you're in the middle, you probably don't know enough about a business”

“I think, I mean, this is actually a good also, I mean, so I think most regrets that we have as investors are the companies we didn't invest in. And so what does it mean? Does it mean that we have to see more companies? It usually means we have to be better at …”

“That being said, I've met many more investors that I'm impressed with in the U.S. Than in Europe, right?”

“And I think a big part of this is the investor steering in the wrong direction and saying that money is going to be there.”

“The role in the investor is not to build a company. It's to trust that you will build a company and that you will build a generational product, and so I think they help sometimes. They might help you with intros and with other things, but it's not gonna make a…”

“Like, risk is just all the investors and, you know, especially when they want to, Extract a bit better terms or, you know, bully you in a down market or whatever, right? They will tell you, like, oh, we would lose you. We'd hate to see you lose everything, rig…”

“If an investor is good if they show up when shit is hard, right, like, everybody is just cheering when it's, like, up, up, up, it's like go faster, But the investors that I have a relationship with today are the investors that were there when stuff was really,…”

“The people that got sucked into this perception game that FTX was playing that, you know, the politicians, the regulators, the investors, they all now are trying to just sweep it under the rug and say, oh, I didn't know about this financial fraud. It wasn't ju…”

“A lot of founders give much tougher love or whatever you want to call it than I've seen investors do.”

“We are seeing across the board, investors are very hesitant to come in and reprice things, and to do the down round, and deal with the anti-dilution, and navigate the mess.”

“And your investors aren't involved enough in the day to day to really know. So they can give strategy advice, but they don't know how you're behaving in meetings.”

“I, so I am biased obviously by the founder side, but I think it's very scenario dependent. So if the founder is still like excited, the team is there, they have grit. Like, I don't think you can ask for cash back. I think like, You want to bet on the founder? …”

“It's a little bit challenging because when you're fundraising, you're a prophet, not a missionary. You have the vision, and you're trying to get people who already get it. You're not trying to convert people to your religion.”

“If it is a really an expectation of you that your investors will be engaged and respond to your emails and participate to some degree, you should set that as a clear expectation and say, this is what we expect from our investors. If that's not you, Totally. Ok…”

“From the exposure that I've had to other founders, that they probably send something in the range of Five requests per year.”

“A lot of the people that we raise money from are people that I've known for three, four, five plus years.”

“When it comes to like sales pipeline in particular, share a Google sheet with the companies that you want to speak to, the specific person within the company, hyperlink, hyperlink their LinkedIn. So it's super easy for me to go. Oh shit. Actually, I do know th…”

“Well, you know, we're holding company for the brands, right? We're not expecting or trying to get consumers to know Deckers. That's not our goal. We want investors to know Deckers, and they do, but we're not pushing the Decker's name to consumers.”

“I think best is this, what did they do? What, like, name the things that they did for you. Favorite is, I would work with them in a heartbeat because I like them, and they are a friend. They are somebody that we go to when we want to talk to an investor withou…”

“I actually believe like the best investors, like for a company to truly be incredible, the founder actually, it has to come from the founder. It really does. It's like a real creative process, like analogy I've been kind of playing around recently. It's like y…”

“I don't think all founders are inherently great pickers. And I don't think all founders are inherently great investors. I do think all founders see better than investors.”

“The success of a company is dependent upon employees one through 10, 10 through a hundred, and the founders. Like, that is what will make or break a company. The investors, the outsiders, the advisors, the mentors, the coaches, that part of a company building …”

“Our job is to say yes, not to say no. And our job is to communicate that decision to a founder in a transparent and quick way. And our job isn't to waste people's time and our job isn't to mislead people. And I think as I've looked at this business for years, …”

“Look at the people who invest in there in the finance industry and look at the, where the value flows versus where the work is being done. And it's just disproportionate.”

“But I think what investors can really do is be proactive in this matter and making sure that there is an opportunity for founders at some point to get some exit and liquidity and in order to be able to swing the whole way. And I think that's something that we …”

“And so when you look at the best investors in the world, they are stubborn, because you need to be stubborn and you need to be able to sit with your positions, but when facts change, you need to change your mind. And the combination of stubbornness and agility…”

“Investors are notoriously bad hiring recommenders. I'm sure I know you're different, but most, most investors and VCs like They make a recommendation, and my advice would be like, just, no.”

“In the long run, people will figure out if you're, you know, every round that goes along, it's more about the business and a little bit less about the CO.”

“One of the things that I loved about being an investor was that job is really a job about one or two decisions a year, or maybe one or two decisions a decade.”

“For a quality of life job, it's a great, great trade-off.”

“People invest the most amount of money when the market is just about to hit the peak. When markets fall, that's when everyone sells.”

“There are basically three types of investors. You've got smart investors that know they're smart and they're going to add value. Then you've got passive investors that are going to stay passive and they're not going to get in the way. Both of those are absolut…”

“I don't think that you can actually ever really have empathy for a founder unless you've fundraised.”

“I don't think so. I mean, it helps, it makes your life more fun, but there are people who are just like a little bit scary, you know, it's like they're a little bit arrogant, perhaps a little bit obnoxious, a little bit too sure of themselves, and I wouldn't w…”

“So YC has an investor database, which has 10,000 people in. I'm sure you're in there. We can perhaps look it up. And it has reviews from all of the YC founders that have taken investment from them, both on their process and what they would like to work with af…”

“And all YC companies have a huge amount of inbound investor interest, and before they book meetings, they will look each investor up in the database and see, I, have you treated found as well or have you not? And if you've not treated found as well, you're not…”

“The investor who's giving you that term sheet wants to preempt it. They want to get in early. They want to get a better price, and so they know that if they do it before you're getting information from everyone else, that's going to help them.”

“Are you raising money? And my answer almost always is, is never yes or no. They want just a yes or no. Usually it's some version of, well, no, but if over the next week we get a term sheet you can't say no to, we're probably going to take it. So that's somethi…”

“When an investor asks, how much are you raising? More often than not, they're actually asking, how much do you think you're worth? Let's start the negotiation on valuation right now, because a 20% is what they want.”

“I think it was too optimistic early on, and I think now I see a deep sense of reality. And part of why I was very optimistic is just because I didn't know any other way to be. Like, I was just very, like, I was naive, and as a result of being naive, I was very…”

“Well, look, the issue is, is that you put a term sheet out in, in it, like, explodes on Friday at five PM, but does that mean? No, but does that mean that you, at five 15, you no longer want to invest? No, like the investor will always be there.”

“I would honestly say they're probably worth more as cash than they are as independent companies, and some of them have made the choice to refund the cash back to the investors, sell off the assets.”

“While investors claim to be long-term, very few have the patience that they extol on their website, you know, and it really requires this relentless focus on the future.”

“The only real protection you can have as a startup founder in your business is to be successful. If you're not successful, there's a lot of ways investors can exert their control.”

“Being profitable, gets you the highest leverage you can have in terms of when it comes to talking to investors, because it gives you the leverage of not needing them. That's his point in the essay too. And so that's always the highest leverage if you can walk …”

“The investors are saying, you should bring your sales in, like, this is the time to bring the sales in, and for us founders, we're like, no, we don't want, like, I don't think it's right right now, and I think we had to go through that bane of, we re started r…”

“A lot of investors, they are A following the crowd very often, and B they're very emotions driven, right? Sometimes they like the founder, sometimes they don't like the founder, they don't like the founder, they don't invest. So it's not very scientific.”

“I think our customers has been the biggest investor of Monday. More money than we ever raised from investors.”

“Waste of time. I meet them when we have an operation, so once every three years we get a transaction, then I'm happy to meet everybody, but .”

“They actually appreciate your conviction in your business. That's what they like to hear. And so when we, you know, talk to them about why we make These decisions, why we focus on the segments that we do, they get our story.”

“I think when people ask, especially investors, their opinion on shit, the correct answer is, don't even answer that question. The real question is, where is your position?”

“We gained so much more respect when we went against the board and said, we're not going to do this. We're not going to do that. We'll focus on this. This is my opinion. This is where I stand.”

“The best founders I've seen are very good at reaching out to investors and people around them on very specific topics when these people, it's leveraging the right people at the right time, being very specific about that versus going to, you know, I think that'…”

“I finished one of the degrees, so if my girlfriend's parents ask, I've finished my degree, and if investors ask, I'm a dropout, which I think is great.”

“So if it's, if money's all made and what's better than we thought, like, you know, using price to pass, I tell you people, investors use price as a reason to pass because they couldn't gain conviction elsewhere. And it still makes them sound pragmatic.”

“Your job as a founder is to be maximally aggressive. And you should do that. And then the investor should hopefully be giving some advice, helping think these things through, giving some perspectives you know, understanding the, a broader time horizon perspect…”

“So, in that sense, I think it's the most interesting one, it's the most frustrating one, and it's the most difficult one, certainly from investors' point of view, to know where to put your chips.”

“I actually think going to the opening of the show, I actually think we're just ignoring the risk because the NVIDIA's numbers are just too good. No, that's what we're all doing. We're ignoring it. This is systemic risk.”

“I think you have to really return a lot of money to investors before you think you're worthy of being interviewed, and I think too many young VCs are too out there when they haven't made a lot of money for investors”

“So I think that the right investor can be a catalyst, but I don't think that you can take a product that would not otherwise be the winner and anoint them the winner.”

“If I meet investors today that haven't actually downloaded and tried to build something themselves, I think they don't have the skill set to make an evaluation of the company they're looking at.”

“I think in general, I think investors underestimate incumbents ability to change their willingness to change the motivation to change.”

“I think the cycle is going to shift once you know, like fungus after the rain, you're going to see another public company change and accelerate, another one accelerate, and then investors are going to say you know, it happens, so let's rethink who else is goin…”

“LPs want money back, and the people that stay in, they're gonna be in business 1015, 20 years from now, are people that will continue to give money back to their investors.”

“The investors who've gotten their capital out, the chances of them having to or being willing to return that capital are zero.”

“Oftentimes they invest because someone else has invested. Oftentimes that's like, 75% of the time, I would say.”

“PG said his advice to founders was always, you should hear the no, but ignore the why, because the odds of them telling the truth multiplied by the odds of them being correct are so low that you're just like very little signal in what investors tell you about …”

“No one's worried about making their last round high-priced investors money anymore. Literally no one is.”

“The baby Elons are gonna get these packages, and it don't really matter what I think, or any of us think, because Enough investors are going to go along with it that they're going to get these packages.”