venture capital

“Only one percent of founders, regardless of their gender, will ever raise venture capital, and so what are the other 99% of us startup founders do to fund our businesses?”

“I think of VCs as booster rockets, and if you've calibrated your trajectory and you know exactly where you want to go, I want to bounce off the gravitational pull of the moon and end up over there at Mars, and I just need the fuel to get to my destination with…”

“When there are that many unknowns about your market, your product, and your aims, the VC path is probably not right for you, especially if rapid scaling is not part of your plan.”

“And the reason I picked that strategy is I said, alright, if it doesn't work, nobody thought it was going to work anyway. But, at least I've had a top tier VC behind me, they've had a chance to see what I can do and who I am, and therefore hopefully get anothe…”

“Like in a venture thing, what you're kind of ideally looking for is that day one of the investment, everyone thinks you're a little crazy. And then at like year two, it's like, oh yeah, that's credible. And at year three to five, it's obvious.”

“When Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton eight years ago he won 30 states. If you added up all the venture capital in all 30 states, it was 15%. The 20 states she won had 85%.”

“USV, I think they're good at a lot of things. They are very, very, like, market and idea driven. And, you know, like all investment theses, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but I think their, like, fundamental world view to me was if you pick, or if a…”

“One of the things that is frequently challenging and frequently counter predictive for successful projects, in my experience, has been when you raise way too much capital initially. And that then says, well, it's because we're going to try everything and go re…”

“To start with, I tried to raise seed money from some VCs, and they did not think the world needed to have another solution. Luckily, I got the seed funding from a few of my friends and in Seneca Valley.”

“I actually have a lot of coaches, but I've chosen all them, and I'm not coachable by a VC who's never held this job, who never sat in this seat, and so I guess it's not exactly advice, but it was implied advice of, you know, I should pretend that I'm going to …”

“In this AI era, we are just hurtling towards living our lives at the speed of play. And I think that that's more and more accessible to all of us, that this idea that we don't, you don't have to quit your job to try out, build an idea that you've been thinking…”