The Ledger, every show

“I don't think legally should be able to invest in that, because it's not my money. It's other people who trust it. I really feel very strongly. These people trusted me with their money.”

“He's like, 90% of VCs are not helpful, and 70% of VCs are actually dangerous. You know, it's actually, I think he was exaggerating a bit, but there's a strong element of truth in it.”

“I think the entrepreneur is the one who needs to have the power. The entrepreneur is the one who creates the value, not the VCs.”

“I would take their money over a lot of VCs any day, in a heartbeat, because I've actually been”

“The doers are usually not at the meetups. Doers are not at a lot of the conferences. They're home coding.”

“And honestly, I don't think it's real work, because what is my work? It's meetings and research, and maybe once in a while fundraising, right, and helping companies, which I do anyway. Like, real work is making payroll, you know, having to go and put payroll o…”

“Honestly, sometimes the best money is dumb money. People give you cash and leave you alone. It's your job to pull this off, right? I genuinely believe it depends on the investor, the person, what they're known for. You know, some are known for being helpful, s…”

“You gotta have product. A product can be mock-ups and like, you know, LOIs from customers. A product can be an actual, you know, working prototype. It's gotta be something. You gotta, if you're not capable of doing that, you're not capable of, you know, you sh…”

“The entrepreneur is the one who makes, who loses big, because they're going all in on one thing for their life, right? For three, five years of their life. For a VC, you're just another company in their portfolio.”

“Ultimately, anyone who puts money in your company, you should look at them as an advisor who's incentivized now, because their money's in it.”

“If you're doing a real, like the real entrepreneurs, everyone I've known who's succeeded, especially people who succeeded multiple times, there was nothing sexy about what they're doing. You know, you watch their weekends, you watch their time. They're just si…”

“My most recent investment was a company called Bolt. And normally, funny enough, it was a uncapped note. I never signed on do uncapped notes, just on principle alone.”

“As an entrepreneur, my job was to say yes to everything and figure it out, right? My job as a VC, that this is the weird thing, is to say no to everything and to find that occasional yes.”

“And to build, you know, currently, like what we built back in the late nineties with giant teams of 20, 30 engineers and product managers and all, and we have our own servers and our own hardware. You can do that now with one or two guys and Amazon services an…”

“That shit, that's what happened with me, and my book outsells most New York Times bestsellers, and it's only on Amazon, right?”

“Yeah, it does, James is, I call him the Oprah of the web.”

“Watching my stock price crash, and by the end, actually, I think I didn't even break even out of the IRS money, you know, but it was a great experience.”