Venture capitalists are like lemmings jumping on the software bandwagon. — Adam Osborne
We need to divorce ourselves from venture capital as an occupation and focus on using capital as a way to take really big bets on things that just seem totally audacious. — Chamath Palihapitiya
VC has always been this high-touch, in-your-face-type business. — Chamath Palihapitiya
There is no country in the world where it's as easy to find venture capital in the stock market as the United States. — Ron Chernow
It used to be that you had to come to Silicon Valley, walk up Sand Hill Road, network with individuals. That's now being completely changed and turned on its head by the whole ICO thing. — Balaji Srinivasan
Never has there been more money available for new ideas to become reality. This is fueling a dynamic landscape of innovation. — Larry Fink
People tend to think that in order to start a new business they have to come up with something new and dazzling, but that's a myth - and it's often propagated by venture capitalists. — Gurbaksh Chahal
Well in terms of our companies, we are very involved in the innovation space. We are not afraid as an investor, we're not afraid of dilution, if we, if we think they're doing it for the right reason. — Cathie Wood
Value investor, high risk, low prospective returns, high prices — Howard Marks
Investing is a business, investment is a project and investor is a promoter. — Vijay Kedia
[The] greatest investment reward comes to those who by good luck or good sense find the occasional company that over the years can grow in sales and profits far more than industry as a whole. — Philip Arthur Fisher
We invest generally in very good companies that have lost their way. And with better management, enormous value can be created. — Bill Ackman
If you are buying into a vacuum of conventional wisdom... the potential to capitalize is enormous. — Cathie Wood
Good investors have to choose how to allocate their mind share with the precious capital they have. — Chamath Palihapitiya
Betting your future on old-line companies is riskier than joining with entrepreneurs and startups. — Cathie Wood
Short Venture Capital Quotes
Nothing turns off an investor more than when an entrepreneur comes in with a ridiculous valuation. — Kevin Harrington
Compete for deals, low returns, slender margin of error — Howard Marks
I wish I had invested in the series A of Snapchat and Uber. — Chamath Palihapitiya
To beat the market you'll have to invest serious bucks to dig up information no one else has yet. — Merton Miller
The most valuable of all capital is that invested in human beings — Alfred Marshall
Invest in startups. Start a company. Create a book, podcast, video. Create a software product. go on many first dates. go to a cocktail party. read a lindy book. move to a big city. buy bitcoin. tweet. — Naval Ravikant
The Silicon Valley model is a builder and seller. — Naval Ravikant
Venture Capitalists Quotes
First of all, in terms of investment in Internet-related developments, venture capitalists - once burned - are now very cautious and are investing in areas that actually make business sense. — Vinton Cerf
The government is somewhat inept, but the private sector is inept in general. How many companies do venture capitalists invest in that go poorly? By far most of them. However, every once in a while a Google or a Microsoft comes out, so people keep giving them money. — Bill Gates
Society can't wait. It's sad there are so many entrepreneurs, business successes and venture capitalists who give no thought to society. — Les Wexner
At a basic level venture capitalists are arbitrageurs: they have access to more information than those with the capital, and access to more capital than those with information, and they profit by exploiting the mismatch. — Ben Thompson
Being a venture capitalist to me is like being more of a psychologist. So if you come to my office we have two chairs with a table in the middle. And we sit down and it's like, Tell me your problems. — Keith Rabois
Venture capitalists are professional money managers. We are provided capital to invest as long as we can return it to our investors with a strong return in a reasonable amount of time. A strong return is three times cash on cash. A reasonable amount of time is ten years max. — Fred Wilson
Show me a first-generatio n fortune and I'll show you a successful partnership between a talented individual and society's invisible venture capitalist, the commons. — William H. Gates, Sr.
Silicon Valley has evolved a critical mass of engineers and venture capitalists and all the support structure - the law firms, the real estate, all that - that are all actually geared toward being accepting of startups. — Elon Musk
Everything you want is cheap or free. If you went to a venture capitalist and said: "I need money to buy tools." You flunked the IQ test, I mean every tool that you need is free! — Guy Kawasaki
A fool and his money will soon be departed applies equally to venture capitalists as it does to everyone else. — David Heinemeier Hansson
Venture Quotes
It's not because things are difficult that we dare not venture. It's because we dare not venture that they are difficult. — Seneca
Life is best organized as a series of daring ventures from a secure base — John Bowlby
I am not made like any of those I have seen. I venture to believe that I am not made like any of those who are in existence. If I am not better, at least I am different. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau
I will venture to go... but remember that you must hold the ropes. — William Carey
Every flyer who ventures across oceans to distant lands is a potential explorer; in his or her breast burns the same fire that urged adventurers of old to set forth in their sailing-ships for foreign lands. — Jean Batten
Many people have the right aim in life, they just never get around to pulling the trigger. The vision must be followed by the venture. It is not enough to stare up the steps -- we must step up the stairs. — Vance Havner
Wine and cheese are ageless companions, like aspirin and aches, or June and moon, or good people and noble ventures. — M. F. K. Fisher
Private Equity Quotes
I think good private equity investors create a lot more economic value than they destroy. — Bill Ackman
A good default, like Portugal or Greece, would be very good for the private equity business. — David Bonderman
Private equity firms aren't necessarily evil by definition. There are many stories of successful turnarounds fueled by private equity, often involving multiple floundering businesses that are rolled into a single entity, eliminating duplicative overhead. — Matt Taibbi
In the 1930s, there was a stretch where you could borrow more against the real estate than you could sell it for. I think that's what's going on in today's private-equity world. — Charlie Munger
I've heard that one-half of the students at elite schools want to go into private equity or hedge funds. They want to keep up with their age cohorts at Goldman. This can't possibly end well in terms of meeting these expectations. — Charlie Munger
It's quite astonishing how much money people make in the hedge fund business and in the private equity field, and how well-off affluent families really are. — Kenneth Rogoff
I think this is also a great time to invest in private equity, helping companies grow from the ground up. — Jim Rogers
Our economy is a plantation run for the aristocrats - the CEOs, hedge funds, private equity firms - while the field hands are left with the scraps. — Bill Moyers
Wall Street, with its army of brokers, analysts, and advisers funneling trillions of dollars into mutual funds, hedge funds, and private equity funds, is an elaborate fraud. — Michael Lewis
Entrepreneurship Quotes
If you're going to be thinking anyway, think big! — Donald Trump
One of my great pleasures from the study of investing, finance, and economics is the discovery of insights about people and society. — Edward O. Thorp
If you're not living on the edge you're taking up too much space. — Stephen Hunt
A lot of people think you can go to school and you can study for how to make money, but the reality is, there’s no skill called business. — Naval Ravikant
As a profession, entrepreneurship breeds anything but balance. The highs can be stratospheric, and the lows can be crushing. — Lewis Howes
Think big, think fast, think ahead. Ideas are no one's monopoly. — Dhirubhai Ambani
I’m going to be an entrepreneur so I can be free. Free to do whatever I want, whenever I want, with whomever I want. — Alex Hormozi
Embrace accountability, and take business risks under your own name. — Naval Ravikant
A talented entrepreneur with bad habits eventually becomes an employee. An average employee with great habits can eventually become a great entrepreneur. — Patrick Bet-David
The thing that kills entrepreneurs faster than failure is boredom. — Tom Bilyeu
When you - when you - and this is still going on today - are making your money by pushing paper around, when you should be making your money by investing venture capital in various job-creating things, that makes it much harder to recover. — Howard Dean
Working in the context of ultra-famous brands like Dior and Vuitton, creative spirits are always going to feel reined in. It's important that they are free to develop ideas. And rather than detracting from the principal job, it reinforces it. I think of that money as venture capital. It's not a big investment. — Bernard Arnault
The first rule of venture capitalism is hands-on experience. You have to get your hands dirty. — Vinod Khosla
The biggest secret in venture capital is that the best investment in a successful fund equals or outperforms the entire rest of the fund combined. — Peter Thiel
I think I would have kept in contact with venture capital investors and entrepreneurs. I'm sure staying involved as something like a coach would be fun. If I handed over the reins to a successor, I wouldn't stick around [to pull strings] like a retired emperor. — Masayoshi Son
If the business were a play, Act One is: Woohoo, bright and bushy-tailed. We're going to make something great! Act Two is: We're six months behind on back-end development. We're trying to raise venture capital. We're trying to figure out what furniture we should sell to make payroll. — Caterina Fake
Venture capital has done much more, I think, to improve efficiency than anything. — Kenneth Arrow
I've been a customer of the top venture capital firms, so I know exactly what they do and don't do. — Marc Andreessen
The wage earner relies upon the ventures of confident and contented capital. This failing him, his condition is without alleviation, for he can neither prey on the misfortune of others nor hoard his labor. — Grover Cleveland
About 4000 men, women and teenagers regularly venture out to play a game in -20 weather and stinging prairie winds. Bundled in sweaters and snow suits, balaclavas on their heads and suction cupped shoes on their feet. They slip and slide across the outdoor hockey rinks chasing a soft rubber puck in the Sponge Hockey Capital of the World. — Bob Cox
The first rule of venture capitalism should be Shoot the Inventor. — Sir Richard Storey
What we're seeing is people wrestling to describe this new thing that's happening. Words like 'philanthrocapitalism,' and 'natural capitalism,' and 'philanthroentrepreneur,' and 'venture philanthropy.' We don't have a language for it yet. — Katherine Fulton
The tax on capital gains directly affects investment decisions, the mobility and flow of risk capital... the ease or difficulty experienced by new ventures in obtaining capital, and thereby the strength and potential for growth in the economy. — John F. Kennedy
America is the greatest engine of innovation that has ever existed, and it can't be duplicated anytime soon, because it is the product of a multitude of factors: extreme freedom of thought, an emphasis on independent thinking, a steady immigration of new minds, a risk-taking culture with no stigma attached to trying and failing, a noncorrupt bureaucracy, and financial markets and a venture capital system that are unrivaled at taking new ideas and turning them into global products. — Thomas L. Friedman
Finance is critical. If sufficient investment is made in infrastructure and venture capital is made available, there will be a big improvement in the situation. — Sanjay Kumar
For venture capital, one of the original principles is people you want to invest in are people who've done it before with someone else's money. Not people who've just came out of business school. — Kevin Kinsella
A lot of the philosophies of the businesses are just 'we're interested in getting customers now and if we're losing money with each customer now that's okay because we have this huge hoard of venture capital that we can subsidise the operation with and once we have the required number of tens of millions of customers and we drive our competitors out of business, then we can start to raise prices and become a proper business.' — Kevin Kinsella
Venture capital has peaked in terms of its appetite, in terms of how much money it wants to put in. So now private equity funds are piling in. Primarily because interest rates are virtually zero so there's no fixed income play and they're not moving around. — Kevin Kinsella
Basically my point of view on unicorns is that private companies which have sky high valuations, it doesn't really mean anything in the real world until it's marked to market. And there's only two ways things get marked to market in venture capital: Either a company is acquired by another company for cash or marketable security, or it goes public, and then it has reporting requirements and then the market will determine the value. — Kevin Kinsella
I think the development of the venture capital system has been an example of something which is a successful improvement in risk-bearing. It doesn't exactly remove the risks at the beginning, but at least creates greater rewards at a slightly later stage and therefore encourages, say, small companies to engage in technologically risky enterprises. — Kenneth Arrow
It doesn't need to be consistently concentrated in these venture-capital funds and things like that. — Edward Snowden
I was encouraged to break all the rules but to take the best of philanthropy, the best of investing, and the best of development finance, and experiment with new ways to create this venture capital model of using philanthropy to back patient capital investments, and then build solutions that were measured in terms of the kind of impact and change they were making on people's lives and in the world, not just on the financial return. — Jacqueline Novogratz
Venture capital is about .02% of the U.S. economy invested, and it accounts for 11% of total U.S. jobs and 21% of U.S. economic output. And the reason why is because these companies can get very big, very quickly. — Juan Enriquez
I try getting in front of as many opportunities as possible, but in the late '90s, I had no idea that I'd end up being CFO of a technology company. I'd no idea what venture capital was. — Roelof Botha
Most venture capital funds are too short-termist and exit-driven to deal with the highly uncertain and lengthy innovation process. — Mariana Mazzucato
I'm amazed by the potential of more companies employing integrated philanthropic initiatives at earlier stages in their life cycle. What if this were done on an even more massive scale? Consider what would happen if a top-tier venture-capital firm required the companies in which it invested to place 1% of their equity into a foundation serving the communities in which they do business. — Marc Benioff
Venture capital is unscalable. Production equals the time each partner has. — Bill Gurley
There is always a critical job to be done. There is a sales door to be opened, a credit line to be established, a new important employee to be found, or a business technique to be learned. The venture investor must always be on call to advise, to persuade, to dissuade, to encourage, but always to help build. Then venture capital becomes true creative capital - creating growth for the company and financial success for the investing organization — Georges Doriot
One role of government is to go where venture capital won't. — Joe Biden
Northleaf is delighted to have been chosen to manage the new fund. We look forward to implementing the fund's long-term strategy of constructing a portfolio of high-potential venture capital funds with the scale and resources to execute their plans, support successful high-growth companies and deliver world-class returns. — Jeff Pentland
These inventors were elevating the formulation of entrepreneurial ideas to the status of a visionary activity. Though forced to justify their efforts in the pragmatic language of venture capital, they were at heart utopian thinkers intent on transforming the world. — Alain de Botton
My buddy Alex Blumberg learned - he was very public about his learning process, and I know for a fact because we sat next to each other for many years, that he knew nothing about venture capital or seed rounds or "A" rounds or whatever you call them, and he had to really learn, like, pitch by pitch. He just screwed pitches up. — David Plotz
There's a real difference between venture capitalism and vulture capitalism. Venture capitalism we like. Vulture capitalism, no. And the fact of the matter is that he's going to have to face up to this at some time or another, and South Carolina is as good a place to draw that line in the sand as any. — Rick Perry
I delivered lectures, and I was also a consultant for international companies in finance, both private equity and big venture capital funds. — Ehud Barak
The innovation industries are rapidly going global. In five years, more than 50% of venture capital returns will come from markets outside the United States, including China, India, Brazil, and Australia, and AlwaysOn events are on top of these trends. — Jim Breyer
All markets have boom and bust cycles, and I think venture capital market has even more exaggerated boom and bust cycles. — Fred Wilson
Solyndra's failure isn't a reason for the government to give up on alternative energy, any more than the failure of Pets.com during the Internet bubble means that venture capital should steer clear of tech projects. — James Surowiecki
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