The Ledger, every show

“90% of the value added of a venture capitalist is finding and choosing the right investments.”

“So basically what we're trying to do is take the financial services that are delivered to the very wealthy through people called private wealth managers, automate those services and software so we can deliver it for account minimums of as low as 500 dollars, a…”

“Because the skills that you develop as an operating executive have nothing to do with identifying which company might succeed.”

“You cannot time the market. There are probably five investors in the entire world who are good at timing the market.”

“We will purposely piss people off With what we do if it serves our core target audience.”

“It's a sucker's bet. It's a terrible risk reward because you have all of this market risk, and there's no way to evaluate it.”

“None of their original ideas were the ideas on which they succeeded. So Apple, Google, you name the company, Salesforce, Hewlett Packard, none of them succeeded at their original idea, if you can believe that.”

“But they all revise history to make it seem like they did. Because you want to buy products from a company that intended to sell to you.”

“It's not my job to find issue with any of the particular things that they do. They're closer to the business than I. It's my job to determine, one, do they have product market fit, to hold a mirror up to them so they can be intellectually honest about their pr…”

“So even our closest competitor, which was pure software, has given it up, and they now have married advisors or planners to their software.”

“I'd rather that we build something that's great or superb for 70% of our clients and shitty for 30 than something that's pretty good for a hundred.”

“The only way to manage an always equal partnership is if you're not willing to go a 110%, you have to opt out.”

“With software, we could do an eighty-twenty on what the endowments do and deliver their capabilities to the masses”

“If you're overly paranoid, you're distracted from delighting your customer, and if you don't delight your customer, you don't create a viral effect because delight is the greatest form of virality.”

“Reacting to competition doesn't ever get you to be first. And you can't win from behind in technology.”

“There's no network effect to Netflix. There's no network effect to Google. There's no network effect to a lot of the, to Apple products, but you love them, and if you love them, you're going to tell all of your friends about them, and that's what defines viral…”

“He's been an investor in my two venture capital firms. And when he heard about Wealthfront, he said, you know, I think this is the best way to manage assets other than perhaps the top 10 endowments in the world.”

“So that gives me faith that ultimately automated investment services are actually going to manage more assets than even ETFs.”

“We think Vanguard is the only company that we know of in financial services that puts its clients first.”

“The amount of sleight of hand and inappropriate fees that are charged by this industry is just abhorrent.”

“Consumer-related businesses, I think you know you found product market fit when you achieve exponential organic growth. Anyone can gain growth through paid acquisition. If you can achieve exponential organic growth, that's when you know you found product marke…”

“Being a CEO, the things that make you a very good leader have nothing to do with the things that make you very good at finding and choosing investments.”

“I think being a really good board member can make the difference between a three X and a six X outcome, but that doesn't really move the needle on the economics of a venture capital firm.”

“I think you learn far more from success than you do from failure. I think you learn more personally from failure. You learn more professionally from success.”

“Almost everything in investing that's good practice is really routine, and computers are a lot better at routine things than people.”

“So the SEC forbids you from using testimonials, but what it means, it really limits innovation because you're at a tremendous disadvantage to the incumbent.”

“Now, Mark hates venture capitalists because the company that he grew to be a billion dollar business actually was very, very hard to finance, and I think 60 venture capitalists, including myself, turned him down.”

“If you can't create a fear of loss, you're never gonna close the transaction.”

“So there is a tremendous amount of research that has been published that shows that even the experts can't pick stocks to outperform the market.”

“Dalbar, an organization, found that this behavior of buying when the market goes up and selling when it goes down costs the average investor about four percent annually.”

“I believe that the premier university endowments are the best managed pools of capital in the world”

“Even though they had made Even on the order of one to five million dollars, they still couldn't afford access to the best investment products and services.”

“And the reason is that we're able to do things in software with regard to minimizing your taxes that Vanguard cannot. And the benefit of that tax minimization is worth at least six to eight times what we charge in fees.”

“And if you do tax loss harvesting just at year end, according to our research, that can add about .6% to your annual after tax return. But by looking for these losses daily, it can add, as I said, one and a half to two percent.”

“It's the first time a virality has been applied to the investment world.”

“All I know is that we still have sixty million dollars in the bank, so we've been a heck of a lot more efficient with our capital than any other player in our space, and that's something that we've been paying a lot of attention to.”

“I think that the Ivy League University endowments are the best managed large pools of capital in the world”

“Mutual funds, for example, are completely opaque. The only information you have about their investments are what they publish at quarter end, and that does not reflect what they're actually invested in.”

“Great example of that is Charles Schwab. They introduced a service last year that's the equivalent to what we introduced in It is in no way comparable on a net-of-fee, after-tax, risk-adjusted basis to what our service has evolved to today.”

“Interestingly, there are about, just about as many companies worth five billion today as there were worth five hundred million 20 years ago, which is why the premier venture capitalists are generating the same phenomenal returns today that they did 20 years ag…”

“I don't read blogs or newsletters because they're seldom well-informed.”

“And automated investment services, like Wealthfront, have been adopted at twice the rate that ETFs have.”

“And I found in my life that treating every negotiation that way works out 90% of the time.”

“One of the biggest mistakes that entrepreneurs make is thinking that everyone, that once others see what you're doing, of course they're going to drop what they're doing and do what you're doing. It doesn't work that way.”

“The CEO is seldom the smartest person in the room, but she usually has the best judgment.”

“I think the poor transitions were the result of the CEO being surprised with being fired. That usually created a lot of consternation. If there were two camps within the company where there were warring factions, where one camp wanted one person to run the com…”

“The challenge with transparency is if you let someone else set the agenda, it can work against you. So it's really, really important to provide context with transparency, because if you don't provide context, people will make up their own, and more times than …”

“Well, the way that we allocate assets or the way that we generate our investment mix is based on the same techniques that he uses. He has access to alternative assets, which we do not because you need to be an accredited investor to access that, but the same m…”