The Ledger, every show

“To be a good operator, you have to really stay on one thing with a kind of a singular focus for a prolonged period of time, and you also have to deal a lot with people, and I'm not really a people person at the end of the day.”

“We don't have a growth fund, for example, we have a fund that we call the Opportunity Fund. And why do we call it the Opportunity Fund? Because things we put in there need to feel like they're actual opportunities. And so it doesn't have any revenue requiremen…”

“I think that developing nations can leapfrog. They don't have much of an existing infrastructure that needs, like, If you look in big parts of Africa, they don't have a grit. They can lean right into decentralized energy production. Just like, you know, why do…”

“The reality is it's four to seven per second, right? So of every second, of every minute, of every hour, of every day, it's like four to seven Hiroshima-sized nuclear bombs worth of heat.”

“I still believe that there's an opportunity today, even after all the damage that has been done both by the prior regime and by the current one, I still think it's not too late because Twitter is Hard to kill. It's a network of networks.”

“Best investment advice is to have one clear thesis about an investment. Like, why, like, what is the one sentence thing, why this investment makes sense?”

“Economics has not all that much to say about business.”

“Today, one of the biggest structural issues we have in the market is that even though we're trading often with open order books, many of the orders in these open order books are basically phantom orders. They're orders that can be withdrawn from the market at,…”

“One of the things that has really changed dramatically since that time is that founder secondaries have become completely customary. And so I think that there are many alternative paths in which delicious would have raised another round and where secondary wou…”

“I think we have fundamentally Created a situation where we're using this new set of technological capabilities, digital technology, and instead of freeing up human attention, we're sucking it down a rabbit hole.”

“And I think today, if you look at the investments we've made in the last few years the vast bulk of those revolves around subscription businesses where we think the incentives between the company and the end user are actually aligned, right?”

“Started making some angel investments, some of which became USV investments, and some of which were USV investments, so it's an angel in Tumblr, and it's an angel in Etsy, and I brought that deal to Union Square Ventures”

“The bulk of our investment Investing tends to be in the deployment phase, which is the phase of all the things that become possible once you have the infrastructure of the new technology installed.”

“We are in the installation phase for VR and AR. You know, people are pouring lots of money into Both handset headsets, displays, other periphery software tooling and distribution but we are, it's not yet broadly deployed, and so it's not yet that there's an in…”

“If you think about self-driving cars, how many self-driving car companies will there ultimately be? It's probably not a large number, and so if you're in the installation phase, you know, you have to get very lucky to pick the winner, and then even within pick…”

“I think the best board member is somebody who can help the team be the best team that it can be. That has many aspects to it, but one of the crucial aspects to that is helping founders and the management team, but especially founders and CEOs, understand what …”

“Invested in a company called Clue, based in Berlin, an app that lets women track their health and their fertility, and said yes because there are more women in the world who will have smartphones than have access to traditional birth control, and there's a hug…”

“No, I mean, look I think we have brand new, 20, 22 funds. We have a new opportunity fund, a new core fund, a new climate fund. And so we're probably not going to be in market for a while because we've kept our funds very small.”

“Brad and I tried to raise a fund together after the .com bubble burst and we couldn't get it done. And so he had to bide his time a little bit. I had to bide my time. And then he teamed up with Fred to in 2003 to raise USV, the first fund, which got going in 2…”

“But as a first approximation, if you're a venture partner in a firm, you tend to tend to have economics primarily in the deals that, or exclusively in the deals that you lead. Whereas when you're a general partner, you have economics in the entire portfolio. I…”

“Today you can get a 100,000 dollars in credits to be on the internet. Like you can get a 100,000 dollars from AWS or from Google cloud and probably also from Microsoft cloud, right? So, so we've swung from being negative a 100,000 to being positive a 100,000. …”

“Josh had written Delicious. It was a fully up and running service while he was still an employee at Morgan Stanley. It was a side project.”

“Delicious was acquired nine months after formation by Yahoo.”

“I first tried to start a venture capital arm for Telebank, and then Telebank got acquired by E-Trade, and then I started my own incubator with very bad timing at the sort of height of the bubble, just before the bubble burst, and then I tried to start a ventur…”