entrepreneur

“Once you take venture capital, the venture capitalist business model is your business model. You've got to get liquid at a number that makes sense for them.”

“We do know that entrepreneurs, though, tend to be more optimistic than the rest of the population. And that once they become entrepreneurs, they become even more optimistic.”

“When entrepreneurs say of competition, that's validating. When somebody sees news of a competitor and says, oh, you know, it's definitely validating of our market or something like that, I pull my hair out because I don't want you to find competition validatin…”

“So what I find now having been in this business for 10 years and then in tech for another 15 is there's this unspoken asymmetric information between VCs and entrepreneurs. It's probably not surprising, obviously, because look, we do this thing hundreds of time…”

“If the entrepreneurs and the employees are not getting the rewards that they need to stay in the business, then this whole business stops. Like GPs and LPs can't make this business go. It is a hundred percent the people making the companies go.”

“One thing about entrepreneurs is they have a ton of energy and they want to go a million miles and a million different ways. And I think what we can do is help them think about what is the best use of their time and the best use of their resources to build wha…”

“Often negotiators, when I see entrepreneurs do entrepreneur buyouts and spin outs through Yale a lot, and they fight on every issue. Like if it's a low success, a medium success, a high success, They grab at each level, even though one level is super valuable …”

“If you're an entrepreneur and you actually know the base rates of failures for entrepreneurs, you might never try in the first place, right? So there's this really interesting tension, I think, between we want that optimism at the global level. We want peopl…”

“I think resilience is perhaps the most relied upon attribute of the job of the entrepreneur, and this is probably why the man in the street is not an entrepreneur, right? The man in the street likes to do a good job every day, get paid, and feel a sense of acc…”

“I think it's much easier to train a scientist to be an entrepreneur than it is to train a business guy to be a scientist.”

“You try to speak with many entrepreneurs. That's probably more important, substantially more important than speaking with LPs, I would say, or GPs.”

“It's entrepreneurs building for capital markets instead of building for users. It's hard to put exactly unless you've been in like, 10,000 pitches Especially in unproven categories like crypto where it's unclear if you have product market fit or it's a complex…”

“The interesting part of this phase of the market, whereas maybe in the 2020 to 20 22 time, folks just wanted the money with the least amount of dilution. If you don't want to take a board seat, great. I don't really need it. I just want the money. I think the …”

“If you've had a few wins, It really does improve the likelihood that the next one's going to be successful for those reasons.”

“So I really do believe that people get too much credit when it goes well, and they get too much discredit when it goes poorly, because so much of it is things that are outside of your control.”

“The win for the seller or entrepreneur is we can be a little more flexible on valuation and they can preserve more ownership versus doing a conventional buyout deal where they may only retain another 10, 20% of the upside on the go forward.”

“Trying to find people where the answer is not just they had money is really important. That's true across the private investment world is there are tons of people with money. There's tons of money out there. You need to ask why the people that are making the d…”

“We always found it extremely useful to talk to the CEOs and the entrepreneurs of the portfolio companies of the venture firms”

“The biggest problem is they're not really in the hands of the venture capitalists. They're in the hands of the entrepreneurs. If you're an entrepreneur who doesn't want to bother being a public company, they're real questions for institutions about how do they…”