venture business

“I think that's the biggest problem in the venture business is that I think that many investors mimic the most aggressive behaviors that as a way to cover their fundamental insecurity.”

“There's no substitute for being great in the venture business than practicing it, and if I viewed this as a 20 to 30 year career, the sooner I got started, the better”

“The value of hits like Facebook and Google in the venture business or the Star Wars movies or the Marvel franchise in the, in Hollywood create sort of orders of magnitude more gravity in our business than even good or very good results with other companies.”

“I think all of those are sort of classic failure vectors for coming to the venture business. I think, you know, all the people with that background a lot of times come in with a lot of hubris.”

“My view of the world is we're middlemen. It's their capital, and we're finding great places to put it. That sounds pretty pedestrian. I really don't like the cult of Personality that sometimes accrues to very, very big names in the venture business. I'm not su…”

“Fintech became 10 or 15% of the venture business, 20% some years.”

“Anyone who's in the venture business saying, I'm a domain expert, I'm only investing in X as an industry sector, I think that's a very fragile and brittle strategy over the time span of decades.”

“Sooner or later, that led up to the year 1995 when someone asked me if I wanted to be in the venture business and I had no idea what that meant. And I kind of thought it was about country clubs and playing tennis. And I initially turned down what the job was b…”

“Venture as a venture business is an incredibly long-term business and that your LPs, you're effectively married to them, right? These funds are often 10, 12, 15 year funds. You know, you end up raising multiple funds, and so it's just very important to do busi…”

“In my view, the LP and the venture business are actually similar in a lot of ways. You know, both are fundamentally about backing amazing people, often with limited control or data as an LP, you know, you're mostly putting money in blind pools. So you learn to…”

“Venture investing can be quite emotional because the companies are so dynamic and get into such trouble, and it's very important to have a balanced decision-making and not have it dependent on how one guy gets out of bed in the morning, and that's not true in …”

“What worries me in the venture business to a degree is people for whom nothing's ever really gone wrong. And life's been pretty easy.”

“If you're an LP that has a, as a sort of existing book of venture business, and you've got it over different times, you will a hundred percent see that people will value their companies differently.”

“The venture business is completely sui generis. It's not a class. There is a small number of people in this craft who make money, and there's a small number of startups.”

“I think 50% of people in the venture business should not actually be in the business. There's too much money and there's like too many tourists. 50, 60% of people in this industry that actually probably add negative value to companies.”

“The venture business as a whole doesn't work. It doesn't work. It shouldn't work. And returns distribution are not divided equally between players.”