Silicon Valley

“But the second someone shows any interest in you in Silicon Valley, all of a sudden you have a bunch of other people that really want to invest.”

“We get introduced to 20 investors in Silicon Valley. 10 of them reply to our email. Five of them meet us for coffee. Zero invested in us.”

“A semiconductor company in Silicon Valley came up with a microprocessor. That they were willing to sell us for eight dollars, and all of a sudden, our eyes were opened, and we said, we can do a von Neumann architecture, program-based, put cartridges with ROMs …”

“To me, it was like, if you're an acting, you're probably a good idea for you to be in Hollywood.”

“If you look at all the big tech companies in Silicon Valley, they're monocultures of engineers and business people. They don't really hire people who make and create content.”

“The second someone shows any interest in you in Silicon Valley, all of a sudden you have a bunch of other people that really want to invest.”

“One of the reasons that Wikipedia became a huge success, I would say, ironically, is the lack of funding. Because if I had had the money, if I'd gone to Silicon Valley and convinced somebody to give me millions of dollars to start this, then your natural insti…”

“When I say Silicon Valley doesn't have design confidence, I mean the investors in Silicon Valley don't really understand design and why it's important.”

“The businesses on the streets, even in Silicon Valley, produce 60% of the jobs inside every city”

“One of the First things we realized is, gee, these guys are having fun, they're making a ton of money, and, you know, they're not any smarter than we are. They just, they're just out doing it themselves.”

“I remember a guy who was branded as serial entrepreneur told me, I'm only a serial entrepreneur because it hasn't worked out. Nobody wants to be a serial entrepreneur.”

“But all the offers were always conditional on moving your company to Silicon Valley.”

“So, at Stanford, I got there, it was 2008, I was 24 years old and very quickly. I knew it was where I needed to be. Primarily because I saw the other 24 year olds not only making millions of dollars, but fundamentally changing the world.”

“There's so much going on in Silicon Valley. There's no technology going on in Berlin.”

“And in fact, one of the reasons that Wikipedia became a huge success, I would say, ironically, is the lack of funding. Because if I had had the money, if I'd gone to Silicon Valley and convinced somebody to give me millions of dollars to start this, then your …”

“By the time people become famous because the thing they worked on succeeded, they tend to be older. But that means the mental image we have of people who do successful things is like 10 to 20 years, maybe even more, older than the ages at which they tend to ha…”

“So I think in Silicon Valley, there's a culture of pattern matching, which it's very limiting in a lot of ways. But when, you know, these picture the next Mark Zuckerberg, they don't picture a black kid. You know, they don't picture a black woman.”

“Somebody working on a construction site works harder than anybody in Silicon Valley. Somebody waiting tables works harder than any billionaire, because it's a really hard job. So hard work alone isn't enough, but it is important and it is a factor.”

“I really think if we had grown up in Silicon Valley and had venture capital around us, that we would have built a very different company that wouldn't have been as disruptive as ours has been because we didn't have venture capital.”

“By the end of the three months I didn't have a tech team, and I left feeling like the biggest failure. Because I had not landed a tech team, which meant that I hadn't landed investors, which meant that all I'd done, in my view at that point in time, was like, …”

“I kind of was like, hey, I'm gonna be in Silicon Valley just gonna be in the area, wanna catch up... I was like, if I just say that I'm going to be there, and he says that he'll meet up, well then I'll go.”

“I think one of the worst exports of Silicon Valley to the rest of the world is the idea that we should celebrate failure.”

“We wanted more like the Silicon Valley release early, release often software strategy than the requirements-driven, very careful science project of NASA.”

“And the real counterintuitive part was, and we should start by doing it on PC. You know, because in, in 2014, like mobile was exploding. You know, everyone in Silicon Valley was focused on, on mobile. And we ended up basically talking about Launching a communi…”

“I've now been around the valley for 15 years, and I came here with a bunch of people who started making companies, and I don't know anyone who persisted and tried again and then tried a new thing and then tried again Who hasn't had some level of success. Event…”

“There's a thing about Silicon Valley, which is it's, it had not been that well geared towards the time and capital intensive science projects.”

“When I was first pitching the company with our initial seed round, and I would pitch to venture investors in Silicon Valley, I didn't get a lot of traction. When I would go to New York or Massachusetts-based investors, that ended up, those were the investors t…”

“I realized that Silicon Valley, we are good at a lot of things, but managing inventory is not our forte. You know, we think of things as very fluid and consumer and bits and bytes. So I said, that's not that inventory is not a great thing to do, but just, we a…”

“And so, we get introduced to 20 investors in Silicon Valley. 10 of them replied to our email. Five of them eat us for coffee. Zero invested in us.”

“Atomico was built with a mission to disrupt the monopoly of Silicon Valley.”

“Silicon Valley was the place to build this business. You know, the, there was more investors who were open to ideas like this. The climate was more open to it as well. A lot of our friends and people we knew in London were very, very skeptical of meditation an…”

“I actually told myself that I didn't have the fortitude to be an entrepreneur that, that it is, it's just so emotionally taxing.”

“But all the offers were always conditional on moving the company to Silicon Valley.”