Silicon Valley

“Genuinely, the average IQ and EQ on Wall Street, and the general hunger and ambition and drive, all that, man, is literally top one percent. You go into the real world, into industry, into corporate, man, it's like night and day. So I was used to Wall Street c…”

“Americans really love the underdog, the comeback story, the Rocky Balboa story. The American dream, you know, I think even Silicon Valley can fail a number of times and still be, end up being very wildly successful, you know, as an entrepreneur. In Asia, it's …”

“The other thing that has us very excited is that we think that Silicon Valley is only going to last for so long. If for no other reason, California is becoming very business unfriendly. If Gavin Newsom wins the gubernatorial race, And he does to California wha…”

“In fact, I would short Silicon Valley right now. If you have real estate in Palo Alto, you should be selling it, because if you're in Silicon Valley, you're, Except for a small place in Silicon Valley, which is an opportunity zone, those businesses are all goi…”

“Geographic expansion is not a big focus for the firm right now, so we're still a very heavy US-centric firm. Probably 75% of what we do is around the Silicon Valley area.”

“Bitcoin, I think it's a pretty bad investment. All the smart people I know in Silicon Valley who made loads and loads of money bought early and sold early. And, you know, it was all the sort of dumb retail people who piled in late.”

“That is one thing I wouldn't do if I hadn't come from Yale and brought venture capital relationships with me or come from Silicon Valley where I'd had the network. It would be really hard to build it otherwise.”

“I often joke that I worked on the two parts of the portfolio with the most entrepreneurial people in the world. If you think Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are entrepreneurial, go meet the people in Texas that are drilling for oil.”

“There is this sort of shift away from the Valley, and it's not huge yet, so I think still 40 or 45% of deals are there”

“And if you just sort of head count the very smart people that come to us that are in Silicon Valley, that are coming out of top computer science programs, et cetera, Something on the order of 10% of them I would say are building blockchain applications.”

“I'd say in the Valley today, there's really two types of investors and most fall in the first bucket. There's the cheerleaders and the people that'll give you the tough love. And I fall in the second bucket for sure. And I think the reason why a lot of people …”

“Silicon Valley exists for other founders, but doesn't exist for the founders that we're serving.”

“People are even talking in Silicon Valley about, like, why is there not a native Goldman Sachs of Silicon Valley, and that's a really good question. There probably should be.”

“I actually loved being outside of Silicon Valley because I think it over my career has made us think differently. We aren't stuck in group think and have been invested all over the country and now globally.”

“Taking secondary at that time as well was like a huge no, no. Like if you did it, You've committed some sort of sin, especially during the 2008 timeframe.”

“Historically, Boston was more conservative and they wouldn't swing for the fences. The Boston venture scene was very much, we're going to put in place a hired gun CEO. When that person's done vesting, they're going to want to flip the company and go to their n…”

“My favorite example is Kiva Systems, the robot company that Amazon bought. No one would back hardware in Silicon Valley when they were being founded. Came to Boston, found folks interested in backing what today we call hard tech.”

“Venture investors in Silicon Valley and find that 16% only are women. That's an absurdly low number. And if you look at the proportion who are African-American, it's only three percent, and that's a crazy low number.”

“Companies in Silicon Valley that have built big operations in China may face a point where they need to separate the two brands.”

“The skill That exists and the innovation that exists, whether it's in Silicon Valley or whether it's in New York and other technology hubs, will continue to make investing in top tier venture managers the most attractive returned over, not necessarily the next…”

“There's a whole long list of things that you might think he's super proud of, but what's interesting is the thing he's the most proud of is actually coaching founders to quit, which really goes against what we think about as Silicon Valley, like VCs who like, …”

“And that's something we're really excited about as well as the tech presence and the salaries have parity in Seattle to Silicon Valley, which is really attractive to us.”

“I saw Silicon Valley as the place that was most based on merit and least on seniority. Being in DC, you get exposed to politics, and politics is so much about have you earned your keep? Have you put in the time? Have you served? Have you risen up through the r…”

“We saw pretty clearly what was happening at First Republic and Silicon Valley and Signature and Silvergate, and we were short all those essentially to zero.”

“Like, I think some of the greatest tragedies I've seen in Silicon Valley is folks that peak when they're 35.”

“50% of every software engineer or scientist in Silicon Valley in the last 30 or 40 years was not born in the United States. 60% of many of our medical research not born in the United States. 77% of everyone in PhD programs in AI not born in the United States.”

“There's basically no Silicon Valley investment in the last two years from multi vertical VCs.”

“So it actually caused us, in 19, we shifted the portfolio away a lot from Silicon Valley towards more bootstrapped entrepreneurs in Ames, Iowa, or Sarasota, Florida, or Niswa, Minnesota.”

“They'd have funds where 90% of the companies they invested in were profitable deals.”

“If there are 5000 people in Silicon Valley writing these angel checks to entrepreneurs, Some of whom end up starting the Ubers of the world. You're gonna have a bell curve of outcomes, and somebody can be on the top end of the bell curve because they're really…”

“I don't think they're any better than non-founder owned businesses.”

“We've been investing in industrial assets in and around Silicon Valley that are benefiting from the physical AI trends, among other things. Rents are up 40% over the last several years.”