venture capitalist

“Venture capitalists are like hitchhikers, hitchhikers with credit cards. And as long as you take them to where they want to go, they will help you pay for the gas. But if you don't take them where they want to go, they will try to hijack the car, and they will…”

“Yeah, but venture capitalists didn't want us to go public. They wanted us to do another round of venture financing, but I was determined not to do another round of venture financing because that would have given them control of the company, and I just didn't t…”

“Yeah, he apologized to me about 10 years later, said it was the worst decision he ever made.”

“Venture capitalists the reason they want what they call F and F money first, friends and family money, is because they know that you might, as an entrepreneur, if things get rough, you might just get up and walk away if it's, you know, some Harvard MBA, you kn…”

“You tend to be able to raise money from venture capitalists if it's either the current hot thing or something that's wildly different so that some VCs might think, oh, that's really interesting. I should take a different bet, and that tends to be how you shoul…”

“The problem with the venture capitalists and the private equity people is that they all thought that because I was an engineer and designer, I knew nothing about making and selling things, and I couldn't possibly make a commercial success of it. So they all tu…”

“Like they want billion dollar businesses and they would either rather, they want you to be a zero or a billion and everything in the middle is not that attractive.”

“Venture capitalists are like hitchhikers, hitchhikers with credit cards. And as long as you take them to where they want to go, they will help you pay for the gas. But if you don't take them where they want to go, they will try to hijack the car, and they will…”

“Six percent of venture capitalists are women, and hopefully that will go up.”

“A pure software company is easiest to do, and it's easiest to raise money for. Every venture capitalist is looking for the next Instagram platform. Where you put 250,000 dollars in, and 18 months later it sells for a billion dollars.”

“You think venture capitalists, you know, want to have a vision and take risks, but you're absolutely right, guy. They minimize risk, and you get it if they're shepherding your capital. They want minimal risk”

“The problem with the venture capitalists and the private equity people is that they all thought that because I was an engineer and designer, I knew nothing about making and selling things, and I couldn't possibly make a commercial success of it. So they all tu…”

“What you have to know at the punchline of this story is that I wound up by the end of this period with 297 individual investors. There was no way to find common ground with an institutional investor, right? A venture capitalist. Believe me, I knocked on every …”

“Venture capitalists the reason they want what they call F and F money first, friends and family money, is because they know that you might, as an entrepreneur, if things get rough, you might just get up and walk away if it's, you know, some Harvard MBA, you kn…”

“All of the venture capitalists at the time, they were focused on this metric eyeballs. How many eyeballs do you have? How many? And that meant like how many people are actually visiting your site? What's your growth in terms of actual, just unique visitors? Th…”

“The problem with venture capitalists is they tend to invest in the ideas that are easy to 10 X or more. And we often have to look to the government to invest in ideas like a COVID vaccine, right? That are probably not going to be as profitable.”

“No, we did not raise tens of millions of dollars. We bootstrapped the business. We made a decision early on that as much as we admired and appreciated what a way had done with their business is that we were going to grow At a reasonable pace. We did not want t…”

“You have three things you can optimize for when you're raising money. You can optimize for the people you're working with, like the venture capitalists, You can optimize for the terms, you can optimize for the valuation, but pick two.”

“As I used to say in venture, a great venture capitalist position themselves to get lucky. You know, they hang around in the right places, and they talk to the right people, and they know enough relationships, and they have the capital, but most of the time the…”

“Most VCs don't actually want to do risky things. They want everything de-risked. And then they just wanted to invest on the upside.”