Venture Capital Quotes

• 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

  Country, United States, World

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• 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

  Jobs, Creating Things, Investing

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• 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

  Successful, Secret, Venture

  Peter Thiel, Blake Masters (2014). “Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future”, p.68, Crown Business

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• 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

  School, People, Principles

  Source: www.sfgate.com

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• 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 Friedman

  Independent, Thinking, Ideas

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• Venture capital is unscalable. Production equals the time each partner has.

  Bill Gurley

  Venture, Partners, Productions

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• All markets have boom and bust cycles, and I think venture capital market has even more exaggerated boom and bust cycles.

  Fred Wilson

  Thinking, Venture, Exaggerated

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• 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

  Jobs, Doors, Organization

  Georges Frederic Doriot, Udayan Gupta (2004). “The First Venture Capitalist: Georges Doriot on Leadership, Capital, & Business Organization”, p.73, Calgary : Gondolier

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• 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

  Jobs, Venture, Reason Why

  Source: bigthink.com

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• Most venture capital funds are too short-termist and exit-driven to deal with the highly uncertain and lengthy innovation process.

  Mariana Mazzucato

  Innovation, Exit, Venture

  "What the Steve Jobs Movie Won't Tell You About Apple's Success". Interview with Lynn Parramore, www.ineteconomics.org. October 23, 2015.

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• Venture capital has done much more, I think, to improve efficiency than anything.

  Kenneth Arrow

  Thinking, Done, Venture

  Source: www.minneapolisfed.org

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• One role of government is to go where venture capital won't.

  Joe Biden

  Government, Roles, Venture

  "What I'd Do Differently: Vice President Joe Biden". Interview with John Phillips, www.caranddriver.com. October 2011.

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• 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

  Business, Play, Two

  "How We Did It: Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, Co-founders, Flickr". Interview with Stewart Butterfield, www.inc.com. December 1, 2006.

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• 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

  Years, Alex, Venture

  Source: www.slate.com

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• 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

  Successful, Thinking, Risk

  Source: www.minneapolisfed.org

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• 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

  Real, Mean, Views

  Source: www.sfgate.com

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• In the face of uncertainty, many companies will default to asking their innovators to study and analyze, which can't actually ever provide a definitive answer. The decision-making systems here are meant to deal with the reality that decisions about innovative ideas will rely on patterns and intuitions. The best venture capital organizations deal with this challenge by staging investment, actively participating in startups they fund, tying decisions to learning as opposed to artificial dates on the calendar, and assembling a diverse team of decision-makers.

  Scott D. Anthony

  Team, Reality, Organization

  Source: bobmorris.biz

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• 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

  Business, Community, What If

  Marc Benioff, Carlye Adler (2007). “The Business of Changing the World: Twenty Great Leaders on Strategic Corporate Philanthropy”, McGraw Hill Professional

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• 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

  Leadership, Jobs, Freedom

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• I think 'Something Ventured' is a nice piece because it celebrates venture capital in a unique and powerful way.

  Nolan Bushnell

  Powerful, Nice, Unique

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• Harvard and Yale concentrated with venture capitalists that got the best calls and brainpower. Very few firms made most of the money, and they made it in just a few periods. Everyone else returned between mediocre and lousy. When returns happened, envy rippled through institutional money management. The amount invested in venture capital went up 10 times post-1999. That later money was lost very quickly. It will happen again. I don't know anyone who successfully resists this stuff. It becomes a new orthodoxy.

  Charlie Munger

  Yale, Envy, Venture Capitalists

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• I know the difference between venture capital[ism] and vulture capitalism. Venture capitalism is a good thing, comes in, gives that gap funding to help these companies get off and get started creating jobs, and work. But Mitt Romney and Bain Capital were involved with what I call vulture capitalism. And they walked into Gaffney and took over that photo album company for no other reason than to basically pick the bones clean. And those people lost their jobs.

  Rick Perry

  Jobs, Differences, Creating

  "Perry dismisses Mitt and N.H." by Jake Sherman, www.politico.com. January 10, 2012.

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• I've been a customer of the top venture capital firms, so I know exactly what they do and don't do.

  Marc Andreessen

  Venture, Firm, Customers

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• 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

  Years, Australia, Innovation

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• 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

  Giving Up, Mean, Government

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