Jonathan Abrams

“And Jonathan Abrams was I'm very paranoid about any of us as investors doing anything close. In fact, he doesn't speak to me to this day. He feels like tribe. He feels like we all kind of usurped and stole his idea for social networking by doing what we we…”

“When you hear venture capital, you know, famous VCs sometimes in the media talking about the lack of diversity in their firms and being challenged about it and saying that they can't relax their standards, and fair enough, but when then you hear people saying …”

“Really it does sound like the benefit of privilege when a family member or a former college roommate or somebody gives you this lucky break that is an entree into that world. It's a weird way of saying that you fell into it. It just doesn't sound like somethin…”

“When it comes to this idea of whether you should be price sensitive or not, there's a lot of different opinions, and none of them really seem to be backed up by data, so it'd be interesting if a venture capitalist came on the show and said, look, we analyzed o…”

“In my case, the angel investments that I've made that were a little high in price have been ones that I was glad that I've made. And when I see ones that are sort of below market or really on the cheaper side, usually they're not the deals I want to do.”

“The reality is there are people who've actually done the math. I've actually seen, you know, a bunch of people who've done the math and proven that a portfolio that has a certain size statistically can be correlated with decent returns.”

“So I think spray and pay can be a bit sometimes a pejorative by folks who want to say, okay, we lead our deals because they're looking to get a certain minimum ownership or whatever they're looking for.”

“Trying to take what worked for one successful company and then apply it to a later startup is, in fact, one of those patterns of failure that can be imposed”

“I actually think that's sort of a myth, that there's some sort of playbook for startup success that the top VCs have that they can do again and again”

“The idea that, that being a Sequoia company is going to be this huge advantage in terms of the branding, there's a lot of great investors these days that have great reputations, so chances are, if you have a bunch of Competitors. They probably have great names…”

“This is an unpopular opinion, but I think most boards are just not very successful, and you look at some of the things that you read in the press about very famous companies sometimes, and some of these companies have some of the most famous venture capitalist…”

“I think a lot of people are on too many boards. So even if you are a fantastic board member, I don't know how you can be a fantastic board member at 10 companies or 15 companies at once. I just think that requires sort of a superhuman attribute.”

“And I think more boards should probably have more nerdy Choices like more CFOs, more CIOs, CTOs, CMOs. I think there should be just more boring operational people on, on some of these boards than the, you know, quite as many celebrities and investors, but ulti…”

“I think one of the things I think is overhyped now is AI, and, or really, or maybe talking about AI, because I'm sure a lot of the, you know, I've invested as an angel in over-fifty startups, I'm sure plenty of them are using AI, but when I hear everybody talk…”

“A lot of managers, GPs, are coming to them And pitching a certain strategy for their fund that is not at all what they've actually been doing or not what they end up doing, and they're pitching that they're going to have a certain specific type of strategy and…”

“What people are getting on Facebook, you know, it's a lot of fake news. It's a lot of clickbait news. I think that nobody still has solved this problem.”

“Hotlinks was sort of a social bookmarking company way too early, trying to help people share cool links with each other.”

“Asking people what they think is a lot less useful than seeing what they're actually doing, and if they're coming back and using it every day, I think that's a really strong sign”

“In terms of the fundraising strategy for Nuzzle, we've consistently gone after investors who are using our product a lot”

“So I kind of feel like some of these sort of frontier tech areas that people are interested in right now, if they're actually really going to be big, the companies that will really be big in those industries will probably be the companies that'll come a couple…”

“And my experience working with a large central road firm is you primarily are engaged with one partner. Even if they talk about their sort of collaborative team approach, the reality is you're pretty much talking, you know, mostly engaging with one person. And…”

“And selling the company six years later, we went through six CEOs in six years. I was, you know, sort of routinely excluded from board decisions and the, our software was rewritten into worse software. The website barely worked for a couple of years and a lot …”