Venture Capitalist Quotes & Sayings

Ask any venture capitalist, and they will tell you that they consider the experience and completeness of the founding team to be a more important factor in their investment decision than the technology that is being built. — Vivek Wadhwa

You can invest in companies, you can help grow companies, you can be a venture capitalist - and be a philanthropist at the same time. — Pierre Omidyar

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.

I wanted to be a venture capitalist and join Sequoia Capital. They've financed and helped built some really special and enormously successful companies, including Google, Yahoo, Paypal, YouTube, Cisco, Oracle, Apple, and also Zappos. — Alfred Lin

This is why a venture capitalist will always follow the maxim of investing in the team, not the plan. Since the plan is wrong, the people have to be right. Successful teams spot the flaws in their plan and adjust. So — Eric Schmidt

God is like a search engine - He is willing to answer your requests, but you must ask Him the right questions. — R.M. ArceJaeger

These are the times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues. When a mind is raised, and animated by scenes that engage the heart, then those qualities which would otherwise lay dormant, wake into life and form the character of the hero and the statesman. — Abigail Adams

I am driven to observe of the ultra-Darwinists the following features as symptomatic. First, to my eyes, is their almost unbelievable self-assurance, their breezy self-confidence. — Simon Conway Morris

The fastest way to get kicked out of a venture capitalist's office is to say that you want to build a business that grows steadily, focuses on employees, and creates wealth over the long term. Entrepreneurs with such ambitions are considered pariahs. — Vivek Wadhwa

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

One highly successful venture capitalist who is regularly pitched by young entrepreneurs told me how frustrated he is by his colleagues' failure to distinguish between good presentation skills and true leadership ability. "I worry that there are people who are put in positions of authority because they're good talkers, but they don't have good ideas," he said. "It's so easy to confuse schmoozing ability with talent. — Susan Cain

As I became a venture capitalist, it's almost like I went to the dark side for a while. — Luke Nosek

The world is a big place. There are lots of smart people in it. Entrepreneurs are kidding themselves if they think they have any kind of monopoly on knowledge. And, sure as I'm a Macintosh user, on the same day that an entrepreneur tells this lie, the venture capitalist will have met with another company that's doing the same thing. — Guy Kawasaki

I like being able to tape things and then having them home waiting for you, but just dealing with the Time Warner Cable people will drive you insane. — Amy Heckerling

The strongest marriage is between two who seek the same God, the strongest friendship between two who flee the same devil. — Robert Breault

I think one of the key differentiators I bring to the table as a venture capitalist is a solid understanding of the public markets and how they operate. — Bill Gurley

Every venture capitalist says at some point, 'I wish I could run this company myself' - to be the entrepreneur instead of the investor. — Alan Patricof

The Cloud-Native Enterprise is a venture capitalist creating continuous innovation powered by Cloud Foundry. — Colin Humphreys

Some libertarians say, 'Well, if people work harder, they can make more money.' But, you know, my mother is a nurse and I am a venture capitalist. I think no matter how great a nurse she is, she wouldn't earn a one-thousandth of what I can make, if that. — Ben Horowitz

Historians will likely give Obama credit for steering the country away from the brink of economic collapse in 2009. — Ron Fournier

Aside from the movies, examples of positive-Black Swan businesses are: some segments of publishing, scientific research, and venture capital. In these businesses, you lose small to make big. You have little to lose per book and, for completely unexpected reasons, any given book might take off. The downside is small and easily controlled. The problem with publishers, of course, is that they regularly pay up for books, thus making their upside rather limited and their downside monstrous. (If you pay $10 million for a book, your Black Swan is it not being a bestseller.) Likewise, while technology can carry a great payoff, paying for the hyped-up story, as people did with the dot-com bubble, can make any upside limited and any downside huge. It is the venture capitalist who invested in a speculative company and sold his stake to unimaginative investors who is the beneficiary of the Black Swan, not the "me, too" investors. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

While I'm a venture capitalist who invests in early-stage tech companies, I often feel like a professional emailer and conference call maker. I try to spend most of my time doing whatever the companies we are investors in need me to do. — Brad Feld

The great genius does not let his work be determined by the concrete finite conditions that surround him, whilst it is from these that the work of the statesman takes its direction and its termination ... It is the genius in reality and not the other who is the creator of history, for it is only the genius who is outside and unconditioned by history. — Otto Weininger

With so little input from labor, the proportion of this wealth that flows back to the machine owners - in this case, the venture investors - is without precedent. It's no wonder that a venture capitalist I interviewed for my last book admitted to me with some concern, "Everyone wants my job. — Cal Newport

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