venture capital

“The game VCs are playing is, is that it's kind of a blockbuster model. They're looking for exponential growth, and when they hit, when you get an Apple, or you get a Nvidia, or an Intuitive Surgical, or you get one of these Companies that just compound and com…”

“I always tell young entrepreneurs, don't give up control of your business to the VCs. They may talk a good game, but they're not fundamentally aligned with you.”

“The founding investors still had a majority of the stock. The VCs on 34%. But if we'd done another round, they would have gotten control of the business, and they had different agendas.”

“The moment they go raise money, they've cut off almost every option. They think they've expanded their experience and their opportunities, but they've cut off almost every possible off-ramp outcome because now they have to be in big business or they fail. That…”

“All of the sort of legacy venture firms at that point, they were all like that. They were all just like tribes of lone wolves. And then the thing that we knew that was not publicly known was, generally speaking, inside the firms, they didn't even like each oth…”

“The idea of a, like, partnership of equals or even a hierarchical partnership, like, it just breaks at some point because there's just too much internal dissension. It is too hard to coordinate, and then everybody's fighting for slices of what was viewed at th…”

“Our theory of it was what we call death of the middle, or we sometimes, the negative way to frame it is death of the middle. The positive way is the barbell which is what's happened in all these other industries, which is basically the industry gets stretched …”

“Because the winning AI companies are raising, you know, 1,000,000,010 of billions, in some cases, hundreds of billions of dollars. Right. The old world of ten million or thirty million dollar, fifty million dollar checks, you know, where VCs tap out, it's just…”

“When we first started the business, I went out and talked to VCs to raise capital, and I got turned down by all the top VCs. So a million dollars over four million dollar valuation at some point in spring, 2012.”

“We could not have gotten Jeff's offer, and six months later, some VC would have given us a massive check that sounded super impressive, and it would have destroyed the business, and then we would have sold our independence, and we would have been fucking miser…”

“Like if an antelope limps in the Serengeti, the lion will take it down even if it's not hungry. Can't even fucking help it. It's just what is, what he does. And that's kind of the nature of most VCs. This, the nature of it is they will, if the, if you are on t…”

“The way I think about it is an operator who's running a company is a, if they're good, is a grandmaster of chess. The VC, and by the way, that grandmaster of chess, this operator, entrepreneur, Is playing this chess match somewhere between 60 and 80 hours a we…”

“10%. And then the one percent is helpful.”

“If you just go take the first term sheet, Getting around done will actually take longer because there's no alternatives. You don't have alternatives. And then it gets weird. And then the VC will just keep pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing, getting more, more,…”

“Having done both, I think I can say it's like much, much, much harder to run a company than being an investor.”

“Every venture investor has made the mistake of selling to early their winners, every single venture investors, because if you look at the great companies, they've compounded 20 years after the IPO.”