Investor

“And I'll tell you what they'll do. They'll demand an enormous discount. And the reason they'll ask for an enormous discount is the other part of what Sachs and Freebrook said, which is it creates massive long tail product liability risk because you're effectiv…”

“You're not even sure what you're going to do with it yet, and you don't need to know. And this is a terrible thesis for someone that's going to have investors,”

“So that, that, that like, so for us, and we told our investors this from day one, That inspiration needs to be as important as value creation, and you need to be on board with that. Like, if we do the greatest thing in the world that nobody knows about and lik…”

“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.”

“Investors that I've talked to are very cynical, so they're perfectly happy to use that in front of their own LPs, but they don't believe that in house. They look at this very cynically and with very cold calculating eyes and compare it to other similar real es…”

“Once investors look under the hood and see more and more of this, they'll be questioning, why are we spending so much on pre-training? Why are you doing billion dollar training runs anymore? If most of the gains and models are coming from post training and RLH…”

“The classic Question I'm sure you get that, you know, all investors get all the time is what's hot and what should I work on? And that's the wrong question to ask. Like the right question is like, what are you interested in? What do you know uniquely?”

“You know, it was, I always say that this private label contract manufacturing is like having an investor because you generate the cash to put into the brand.”

“If you cannot crystallize it for your investors, You won't be able to crystallize it for customers, and VCs are not necessarily forward indicators of the market, but there's some derivative of what your customers are seeing, because if everyone wants to buy yo…”

“The number of investors that actually show up and try to help you. Is unbelievably small.”

“The one thing I would say to founders is look out for your employees because chances are, especially for a lot of young founders, they're going to work with these people again. And so treat them really well. Treat them better than you treat yourself. Advocate …”

“An investor is telling you to do something which may not be right for the long term direction of your product, of your company, right? And you have to make difficult choices at that point in time. So are you going to compromise on your product or on your value…”

“I don't really think there's such thing as risk loving, risk aversion. I think that there are only people who actually Perceive there's no risk. I think that no one actually really invests with a lot of risk. I think that, that people actually convince themsel…”

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

“When you have these bootstrapped exits, You've done well for yourself, but you haven't shown investors you can return their money. So it was really, it took us a while to raise some money.”

“Investors at first pass will include as many possible rights and privileges for the investment firm as possible. And it is expected and very common that a founder will negotiate those and make sure that the company is in the best spot to go forward”

“In fact, they'll discount anything you say anyway. So if you tell them, ah, you know, we're going to be a billion dollar company, they'll probably think, well, oh, well, they'll only be a five hundred million dollar company. You say ten billion, they'll probab…”

“I think when people say that, for the most part, what you end up with, and I do mean the most part, is some form of excuses as to why, sure, this is not great, but it will be if you wait long enough.”

“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 …”

“Hey, this is a Bad setup for investors. Because we're reliant on operators to bring us the investment, we're not controlling our funnel of sourcing. Then we're giving up upside if things go well.”

“There is a benefit because you only learn if you own a staff. We can talk whole day about how wonderful the business is, but once you own it, and once you're underwater in that name, it sharpens your thinking quickly.”

“We started pitching the deals to investors, you know, all, they all came to the DC area and everybody that saw it was so impressed they wanted in, so we got to choose which team we wanted to work with, and that's what we did. Took nine months, by the way.”

“And so if you're an investor and you're looking for diversification, there's no place to get it other than private markets.”

“Founders either have to agree to or not this system. And so we actually are the ones propping it up. We're giving it the fresh meat it needs to survive because it's so value destroying.”

“Dual class is defeated all the time. I give a bunch of examples in the book, like, you know, the stock price drops. Everyone panics. Founders forced out anyway, because at the end of the day, like having the votes is not the only thing that matters. There's a …”

“I think the reality is, is like the cynical, but realistic world is these things go public at huge number. I think people will sell less than they, than people think they will, because it's kind of like you're on the train. Getting off the train is a pretty dr…”

“So investors now are unwilling to give gobs and gobs of money when you don't have commercial traction or a plan for revenue and what you're going to get that revenue. And they're not necessarily willing to wait years and years for that to happen.”

“If you take all the winners and all the losers and sum them up, And don't take out any fees. You come up with zero. Every positive winner on the side of a trade has a loser on the other side of the trade. And so in aggregate, all investors together are the mar…”

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

“I think it should be everybody's job as an investor. So, so that would be the first thing is I consider it to be kind of one of the top bullet points in the job description”

“So if you just rely on your experience from 10 years ago, even though you may have been successful, I think that's actually makes you like really dangerous because now you're like credible and wrong. It's one thing when you're just wrong and you don't have cre…”

“If you have to be right all the time, if there's something in your makeup that recall, that says you're going to be unhappy if you're not right all the time, don't become an investor.”

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

“I told the investors we needed, we were gonna lose three billion dollars.”

“If you go out at a lower price, and this is what I, the advice I generally give is go out at a lower price so you can have that momentum carry your price up. Everybody's happy. Your new investors are happy. Your employees will be happy. It costs you a little b…”

“And I think they're probably in all honesty, more people that are cut out to be investors than there are entrepreneurs”

“Some of those investors are not just great pickers. They have the ability to create great companies. Because they put their full weight behind them.”

“Most investors say they hate the idea of a middleman who's taking a success fee, but then they still go and take all of those messages from the middleman and instead of the founder who wouldn't have to pay a fee if they didn't need a middleman.”

“The only annoying thing that impacted us that ended up killing us was that one of our investors signed an agreement and then didn't pay us all of the money he promised.”

“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.”

“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…”

“One of the ways that this really bubbles up is when your investors are not happy. They invested the money on you and now they're not happy with how the company's being run, that the company is not making money and so on. And that's when all this could surface …”

“A lot of the content that entrepreneurs are actually consuming or actually created by investors. And so you could have incentive alignment with them, but many cases, your incentives are misaligned and we should just think about that. And what's disturbing abou…”

“Somebody was asking me the other day... Why haven't you taken investors?... And I said, cause you got to pull this thing out of my cold dead fingers.”

“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.”

“You want to have someone that has potential to lead your next round in the round before, even if it's a small check, because what you want to be able to do is give them Insights into how you're doing before you go to them for the next round.”

“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.”

“I don't think it's a race to the bottom, because after all, you have investors and others on the outside who are, Very discerning, and they decide, you know, after all, you know, what makes for a good company and what policies, ah, matter.”

“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”

“That's what if I'm an investor, and you know, we speak to investors all the time, that's what they are looking for, that hey, would this, will AI re-accelerate this company's growth? And unless you show re-acceleration, they are going to say, okay, maybe I'm n…”

“I think very few people know their tolerance for pain. Looking, just trying to be, like, prospective about it. I think you have to experience it in the trenches, so to speak, before you actually know how you're going to feel.”

“In general, it's, don't, Order the most expensive thing on the menu. Does it really matter? Especially, like, an investor, do they really care? No, they don't really care, but they do notice, and you're like, ah, you're the type of person that, like, is truly …”

“There's such an excitement and frenzy today to invest in those companies that are generating millions of dollars of new revenue out the gate that before wasn't considered possible until a company got to the seed or even series A level.”

“Even for example, we have raised investments. All the investors have actually approached us rather than we approach it.”

“Saying we've grown organically. Doesn't mean anything for a B to B SaaS founder that's trying to raise money from investors because those investors want to see that you have the potential of being a billion dollar company, right?”

“Once you start to raise your entire day for weeks or months on end is going to be going and reaching out to investors. So you won't be able to talk to customers and you won't be able to have meetings with your team.”

“The thing about investors is they will change your business, whether you like it or not.”

“Whatever the amount is, times it by five or 10, because that's what they want back. So that's really what you're taking. If you take a million dollars, you're really taking ten million because you've got to give ten million back. That's what their expectation …”

“Don't listen to what investors say. They're not close to the customers and the users. They don't actually know. They could maybe be a proxy at best, but they're pretty noisy proxy.”