Silicon Valley

“Yeah, the Dutch culture is sort of the opposite, you know, make sure that you never fail. So learning goes a lot slower there, I think.”

“I mean, Zucks is by far right now the best CEO in the Valley in my personal opinion.”

“The producer is the glue between the money and the creatives. And the producer basically is the, bridges the cultural gap, really, and we don't have that in Silicon Valley, and that's where a lot of deals break down, because you have VCs who are money people, …”

“I just think a lot of these tech kind of hubs, they're just, they're really overrated. It's a lot of work to find quality people, and many times you know more than all of them anyway”

“And we ended up having 31 out of 33 employees move with us.”

“We have five full-time people. And by the way, I'm the only one in Silicon Valley. Everyone else is in St. Louis in the Midwest. So there's five full-time and there's a bunch of freelancers, probably about four or five freelancers.”

“I mean, Zucks is by far right now the best CEO in the Valley in my personal opinion.”

“Like, don't wait for a job. Don't, you know, don't make it too complicated. Just come out, figure out a play to stay with inexpensively. Talk to a lot of people, go to a lot of conferences and then figure it out. I think that there's a way to make it too compl…”

“I think that's one of the problems I'm seeing in Silicon Valley is a lot of these companies, not necessarily these wealth management companies, but in general are not getting enough funding. Everybody wants to build fintech companies. Exactly. There's no one t…”

“Israel has a very powerful VC ecosystem. Very powerful. So, so there's a lot of capital in Israel. It's not different than from any other place like Silicon Valley in New York.”

“I mean, salaries are about half in, in Europe or in Stockholm or even less compared to Silicon Valley.”

“We're fortunate that we're the first platform in Silicon Valley in San Francisco to receive the approval to allow they call it non-accredited investors to invest.”

“Like, the US guys buy, like to buy from American companies. Germans like to buy from Silicon Valley.”

“After I raised my first three million in capital, I realized I could not sustain a business in Silicon Valley.”

“So what we did was, when we were planning this, and this was just gleams in our eyes, we raised funding from a set of Silicon Valley and Bitcoin angels. There were a couple of Silicon Valley DCs, but they were almost all angels. We raised three million dollars”

“I probably wouldn't have been as focused on being well-rounded. I probably wouldn't have ran. I probably would have ran out the Silicon Valley earlier.”

“When someone rolls into the valley in 2011 with a pretty high run rate kicking off that kind of cash, you don't need leverage, right? I mean, we didn't even really meet when we had seven term sheets and an offer to sell the company.”

“You have to go to Hollywood if you're an actor, and you've got to go to Silicon Valley if you're a startup guy or gal.”

“So about 25 people we have a pretty sizable technology team offshore in India under a fantastic CTO that's based here in Silicon Valley.”

“And secondly Italy is not Silicon Valley, so we don't have a very developed venture capital fund. So we needed to find a way to raise money without without having a venture capital around.”

“We also just don't have the expenditures and burn rates that typical valley companies do, just simply based on the cost of an engineer. It's like, One and a half X less or at least two X less than it is in the Valley.”

“So if you were in the valley and you, instead of collecting eighty-twenty, you were collecting fifty-fifty annual and monthly, I ran the numbers. We would have had to have raised two years ago just over ten million dollars, right?”

“I actually think this is a terrible time for entrepreneurs right now, especially in the valley, because it's safer now because of the cost of living and everything else to Bury yourself in a large corporation.”

“I watched the secretary of Homeland Security show up at a coffee shop in Los Altos and talk to the two founders of Google quietly. There's trap doors that have been built all over Silicon Valley that we know nothing about.”

“They're sort of levered for growth, right? It's like they raise as much money as we can as quickly as we can. And in order to grow as much as we can and like, let's not, let's forget about, you know, profits or sustainability or really anything. It's just the …”

“Part of the problem is, is that the people with money in Silicon Valley typically made it doing early stage startups, you know, and they, so they understand it. Versus people in places like, you know, Vancouver, or Chicago, or, you know, DC, made their money e…”

“Like, you can have, you know, a sustainable, calm software business that's throwing off cash. Like, that's something that you can build without necessarily having to go ask permission from Silicon Valley VCs in order to do it.”

“So this is a two big inputs we have is one, we have a baseline compensation and a baseline comp is we actually pay very similar to like what a sales rep would make in Silicon Valley or New York city.”

“I mean, I'd say companies are on Silicon Valley and SAS. We're seeing anywhere between You know, five to twelve million of ARR annual recurring revenues per year is typically that striking point of a series B, which would be, you know, 20 to forty million of a…”

“In that industry, because there's no Silicon Valley, it takes on average eight to 12 months to raise capital.”

“Secondaries done right, can give motivation which allows, you know, early founders and early employees to keep going as opposed to, you know, stop, right? Cause it's easy to say, oh, I've been grinding away for however many years and I just need something out …”

“And then the other thing is, you know, we're a Canadian company, so we don't get the Silicon Valley. If we were a Silicon Valley company, yeah, we would have it would be a different story, but you know what?”

“We were actually profitable when we raised the money. What I think in Silicon Valley especially is whether you like it or not the type of venture firm you partner with kind of sets up your brand, right? So with a thousand companies, startups around, and like y…”

“I probably, when I was younger, would have probably benefited from just going west and getting into the Silicon Valley scene a lot sooner than I did later.”

“If you go try and hire in Silicon Valley, Everybody is demanding maximum equity and, you know, like everywhere else in the world, people, you can, I have to force it on people.”

“It was over a million a month. Very, very quickly. We were getting like all these companies in Silicon Valley.”

“When you have 10 values, I challenge you to find, you know, find a Silicon Valley company whose values you're like, I wouldn't fit. Like, you're gonna fit, because you're like, eight or 10 of those are like, sound like me. And we wanted to be, like, incredibly…”

“So it's like this sort of whole economy that was overlooked by traditional Silicon Valley of people who have small businesses. And I think it's not super attractive to a lot of SaaS companies because they want to go after the big whales of getting these large …”