Investor Startup Quotes

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Promise yourself to stop buying into people’s potential. You’re not a start-up investor.
Florence Given (Women Don't Owe You Pretty)
A sociopath is often described as someone with little or no conscience. I’ll leave it to the psychologists to decide whether Holmes fits the clinical profile, but there’s no question that her moral compass was badly askew. I’m fairly certain she didn’t initially set out to defraud investors and put patients in harm’s way when she dropped out of Stanford fifteen years ago. By all accounts, she had a vision that she genuinely believed in and threw herself into realizing. But in her all-consuming quest to be the second coming of Steve Jobs amid the gold rush of the “unicorn” boom, there came a point when she stopped listening to sound advice and began to cut corners. Her ambition was voracious and it brooked no interference. If there was collateral damage on her way to riches and fame, so be it.
John Carreyrou (Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup)
As we said, even the best venture investors have a portfolio, but investors who understand the power law make as few investments as possible.
Peter Thiel (Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future)
The best entrepreneurs are not the best visionaries. The greatest entrepreneurs are incredible salespeople. They know how to tell an amazing story that will convince talent and investors to join in on the journey.
Alejandro Cremades (The Art of Startup Fundraising)
He bought an existing business with a well-defined business model and one with a long history of operations that he could analyze. This is waaaaaaaay less risky than doing a startup.
Mohnish Pabrai (The Dhandho Investor: The Low-Risk Value Method to High Returns)
Investors are people with more money than time. Employees are people with more time than money. Entrepreneurs are simply the seductive go-betweens. Startups are business experiments performed with other people’s money. Marketing is like sex: only losers pay for it.” “Company culture is what goes without saying. There are no real rules, only laws. Success forgives all sins. People who leak to you, leak about you. Meritocracy is the propaganda we use to bless the charade. Greed and vanity are the twin engines of bourgeois society. Most managers are incompetent and maintain their jobs via inertia and politics. Lawsuits are merely expensive feints in a well-scripted conflict narrative between corporate entities. Capitalism is an amoral farce in which every player—investor, employee, entrepreneur, consumer—is complicit.
Antonio García Martínez (Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley)
But between the founding and the actual PayPal, it was just this tug-of-war where it was like, 'We're trying this, this week." Every week you go to investors and say, "We're doing this, exactly this. We're really focused. We're going to be huge." The next week you're like, "That was a lie.
Max Levchin
He now felt like a pawn in a dangerous game being played with patients, investors, and regulators. At one point, he’d had to talk Sunny and Elizabeth out of running HIV tests on diluted finger-stick samples. Unreliable potassium and cholesterol results were bad enough. False HIV results would have been disastrous.
John Carreyrou (Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup)
Entrepreneurs often mistake their business plan as a cookbook for execution, failing to recognize that it is only a collection of unproven assumptions. At its back, a revenue plan blessed by an investor, and composed overwhelmingly of guesses, suddenly becomes an operating plan driving hiring, firing, and spending. Insanity.
Steve Blank (The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company)
However, angel investors by definition are not philanthropists or do-gooders in this area of their lives.
David S. Rose (Angel Investing: The Gust Guide to Making Money and Having Fun Investing in Startups)
If you're not hungry enough to die, no one will come to feed you
Anuj Jasani
Trading is something that is not for everyone but everyone can try it once to be successful
Anuj Jasani
NFTs are digital real estate and it is going to be worth a lot more than real estate
Anuj Jasani
But market stats are like scripture: anyone can find that they're looking for to support their position if they look long and hard enough.
Tom Hogan (The Ultimate Start-Up Guide: Marketing Lessons, War Stories, and Hard-Won Advice from Leading Venture Capitalists and Angel Investors)
The goal - at least the way I think about entrepreneurship - is you realize one day that you can't really work anyone else. You have to start your own thing. It almost doesn't matter what the thing is. We had six different business plan changes, and then the last one was PayPal. If that one didn't work out, if we still had the money and the people, obviously we would not have given up. We would have iterated on the business model and done something else. I don't think there was ever clarity as to who we were until we knew it was working. By then, we'd figured out our PR pitch and told everyone what we do and who we are. But between the founding and the actual PayPal, it was just like this tug-of-war where it was like, "We're trying this, this week." Every week you go to investors and say, "We're doing this, exactly this. We're really focused. We're going to be huge." The next week you're like, "That was a lie.
Jessica Livingston (Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days)
The founders of start-ups as varied as YouTube, Palantir Technologies, and Yelp all worked at PayPal. Another set of people—including Reid Hoffman, Thiel, and Botha—emerged as some of the technology industry’s top investors. PayPal staff pioneered techniques in fighting online fraud that have formed the basis of software used by the CIA and FBI to track terrorists and of software used by the world’s largest banks to combat crime. This collection of super-bright employees has become known as the PayPal Mafia—more or less the current ruling class of Silicon Valley—and Musk is its most famous and successful member.
Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: Inventing the Future)
Those I call Horace are absolutely convinced they’re some sort of social wit. Without a doubt they’re intelligent, and most likely very wealthy, although their wealth will come from a business they were set up in by others from their ‘school.’ They’ll have had no need to go to university. Rich people will have set them up in business, possibly Public Relations or something like that, they’ll have helped them write a business plan, loaned them money, and provided advice and guidance at every step of the way. Money would have been forthcoming from investors until the business was able to run itself. And then Horace will swan about as if he did it all himself.
Karl Wiggins (Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe)
Zero to One is about how to build companies that create new things. It draws on everything I’ve learned directly as a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir and then an investor in hundreds of startups, including Facebook and SpaceX.
Peter Thiel (Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future)
Rule No. 5: No Business Plan Survives First Contact with Customers So Use a Business Model Canvas There’s only one reason for a business plan: some investor who went to business school doesn’t know any better and wants to see one.
Steve Blank (The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company)
The startup’s goal is to find a profitable customer acquisition strategy by spending small amounts of money in a lot of them, measuring results, and then narrowing down the best channels, while performing PDCA for continuous improvement.
Francisco S. Homem De Mello (Hacking the Startup Investor Pitch: What Sequoia Capital’s business plan framework can teach you about building and pitching your company)
For a long time, it was one of these things where—I was really much younger than now—my whole "brand" both to the investors and to our board members was this crazy Russian boy-genius who comes out and sprinkles magic dust on technology and things just work.
Max Levchin
When someone tells me they have a founder they want to introduce me to but they’re worried because the person is a wild card, I set that meeting up for the next day. Angel investors are looking for wild cards, because the best founders are typically inflexible and unmanageable, pursuing their visions at the expense of other people’s feelings.
Jason Calacanis (Angel: How to Invest in Technology Startups—Timeless Advice from an Angel Investor Who Turned $100,000 into $100,000,000)
I like innovation. I like ideas. I like people and I like being part of winning teams. I don't gamble, I don't watch sports, I don't do any of those things. What I like to do is bet on people in the innovation business, so as soon as I had the capacity, that’s what I started doing as an individual—writing some small checks, and then some bigger checks.
Josh Maher (Startup Wealth: How the Best Angel Investors Make Money in Startups)
Michael Arrington, the loudmouth founder and former editor in chief of TechCrunch, is famous for investing in the start-ups that his blogs would then cover. Although he no longer runs TechCrunch, he was a partner in two investment funds during his tenure and now manages his own, CrunchFund. In other words, even when he is not a direct investor he has connections or interests in dozens of companies on his beat, and his insider knowledge helps turn profits for the firm.
Ryan Holiday (Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator)
Murdoch also derived comfort from some of the other reputable investors he heard Theranos had lined up. They included Cox Enterprises, the Atlanta-based, family-owned conglomerate whose chairman, Jim Kennedy, he was friendly with, and the Waltons of Walmart fame. Other big-name investors he didn’t know about ranged from Bob Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots, to Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim and John Elkann, the Italian industrialist who controlled Fiat Chrysler Automobiles.
John Carreyrou (Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup)
This was news to Mosley. He thought the system was reliable. Didn't it always seem to work when investors came to view it? Well there was a reason it always seemed to work, Shaunak said. The image on the computer screen showing the blood flowing through the cartridge and settling into the little wells was real. But you never knew whether you were going to get a result or not. So they'd recorded a result from one of the times it worked. It was that recorded result that was displayed at the end of each demo.
John Carreyrou (Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup)
Thinking about what might happen if we ran completely out of money—laying off all the employees that I’d so carefully selected and hired, losing all my investors’ money, jeopardizing all the customers who trusted us with their business—made it difficult to concentrate on the possibilities. Marc Andreessen attempted to cheer me up with a not-so-funny-at-the-time joke: Marc: “Do you know the best thing about startups?” Ben: “What?” Marc: “You only ever experience two emotions: euphoria and terror. And I find that lack of sleep enhances them both.
Ben Horowitz (The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers)
Less than three months later, the walls began closing in again: on March 14, 2018, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Theranos, Holmes, and Balwani with conducting “an elaborate, years-long fraud.” To resolve the agency’s civil charges, Holmes was forced to relinquish her voting control over the company, give back a big chunk of her stock, and pay a $500,000 penalty. She also agreed to be barred from being an officer or director in a public company for ten years. Unable to reach a settlement with Balwani, the SEC sued him in federal court in California. In the meantime, the criminal investigation continued to gather steam. As of this writing, criminal indictments of both Holmes and Balwani on charges of lying to investors and federal officials seem a distinct possibility.
John Carreyrou (Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup)
The VCs were prolific. They talked like nobody I knew. Sometimes they talked their own book, but most days, they talked Ideas: how to foment enlightenment, how to apply microeconomic theories to complex social problems. The future of media and the decline of higher ed; cultural stagnation and the builder’s mind-set. They talked about how to find a good heuristic for generating more ideas, presumably to have more things to talk about. Despite their feverish advocacy of open markets, deregulation, and continuous innovation, the venture class could not be relied upon for nuanced defenses of capitalism. They sniped about the structural hypocrisy of criticizing capitalism from a smartphone, as if defending capitalism from a smartphone were not grotesque. They saw the world through a kaleidoscope of startups: If you want to eliminate economic inequality, the most effective way to do it would be to outlaw starting your own company, wrote the founder of the seed accelerator. Every vocal anti-capitalist person I’ve met is a failed entrepreneur, opined an angel investor. The SF Bay Area is like Rome or Athens in antiquity, posted a VC. Send your best scholars, learn from the masters and meet the other most eminent people in your generation, and then return home with the knowledge and networks you need. Did they know people could see them?
Anna Wiener (Uncanny Valley)
Patrick Vlaskovits, who was part of the initial conversation that the term “growth hacker” came out of, put it well: “The more innovative your product is, the more likely you will have to find new and novel ways to get at your customers.”12 For example: 1. You can create the aura of exclusivity with an invite-only feature (as Mailbox did). 2. You can create hundreds of fake profiles to make your service look more popular and active than it actually is—nothing draws a crowd like a crowd (as reddit did in its early days). 3. You can target a single service or platform and cater to it exclusively—essentially piggybacking off or even stealing someone else’s growth (as PayPal did with eBay). 4. You can launch for just a small group of people, own that market, and then move from host to host until your product spreads like a virus (which is what Facebook did by starting in colleges—first at Harvard—before taking on the rest of the population). 5. You can host cool events and drive your first users through the system manually (as Myspace, Yelp, and Udemy all did). 6. You can absolutely dominate the App Store because your product provides totally new features that everyone is dying for (which is what Instagram did—twenty-five thousand downloads on its first day—and later Snapchat). 7. You can bring on influential advisors and investors for their valuable audience and fame rather than their money (as About.me and Trippy did—a move that many start-ups have emulated). 8. You can set up a special sub-domain on your e-commerce site where a percentage of every purchase users make goes to a charity of their choice (which is what Amazon did with Smile.Amazon.com this year to great success, proving that even a successful company can find little growth hacks). 9. You can try to name a Planned Parenthood clinic after your client or pay D-list celebrities to say offensive things about themselves to get all sorts of publicity that promotes your book (OK, those stunts were mine).
Ryan Holiday (Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising)
EVERYBODY SELLS Nerds might wish that distribution could be ignored and salesmen banished to another planet. All of us want to believe that we make up our own minds, that sales doesn’t work on us. But it’s not true. Everybody has a product to sell—no matter whether you’re an employee, a founder, or an investor. It’s true even if your company consists of just you and your computer. Look around. If you don’t see any salespeople, you’re the salesperson.
Peter Thiel (Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future)
Getting paid is, in some ways, the ultimate metric for identifying a sustainable business model. If you make more money from customers than it costs you to acquire them — and you do so consistently — you’re sustainable. You don’t need money from external investors, and you’re growing shareholder equity every day.
Alistair Croll (Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster (Lean (O'Reilly)))
the ride-sharing service Uber is the hottest, most valuable technology start-up on the planet. It is also one of the most controversial. The company, which has been the target of protests across Europe this week, has been accused of a reckless attitude toward safety, of price-gouging its customers, of putting existing cabbies out of work and of evading regulation. And it has been called trivial. In The New Yorker last year, George Packer huffed that Uber typified Silicon Valley’s newfound focus on “solving all the problems of being 20 years old, with cash on hand.” It is impossible to say whether Uber is worth the $17 billion its investors believe it to be; like any start-up, it could fail.
Anonymous
So we said, "OK, we'll do Apple Computer." In those days there was no money yet in this microcomputer business, and big experienced companies and investors, analysts-those kind of people, that are trained in business and much smarter than we were-they didn't think that this was going to be a real big market. They thought it was going to be a little hobby thing, like home robots or ham radios, that a few techie people would get into and really it wasn't going to go to the masses.
Jessica Livingston (Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days)
With $30 million raised from top-tier investors like Richard Branson and Andreessen Horowitz, Lucas Duplan had one message for the media earlier this year: His startup, Clinkle, was going to be big when it launched. But that’s just about all he would reveal.
Anonymous
My premise is that startups and emerging companies should adopt a new, simple approach—start small, stay lean, raise only the funding you really need, grow the business judiciously and then execute an early exit.
Basil Peters (Early Exits: Exit Strategies for Entrepreneurs and Angel Investors (But Maybe Not Venture Capitalists))
Product Hunt has become the place for those in the tech world to learn about new products. Investors follow it for ideas about where to put their money; entrepreneurs and developers check on what the competition is up to; and writers and editors use it for story ideas. Startup founders often go to the site to defend their products against criticism or to talk them up. Product Hunt's listings offer a way to control the message about a product because entrepreneurs can respond to questions and critiques. Groupon co-founder Andrew Mason and former Facebook executive Bret Taylor used Product Hunt when launching new companies last year because the executives could get immediate feedback from early adopters.
Anonymous
Plenty of founders use Lean Startup as an excuse to start a company without a vision. “It’s so easy to start a company these days.” They reason, “the barriers are so low that everyone can do it, right?” Yet having a big vision is important: starting a company without one makes you susceptible to outside influences, be they from customers, investors, competition, press, or anything else. Without a big vision, you’ll lack purpose, and over time you’ll find yourself wandering aimlessly.
Anonymous
Globalization replaced technology as the hope for the future. Since the ’90s migration “from bricks to clicks” didn’t work as hoped, investors went back to bricks (housing) and BRICs (globalization). The result was another bubble, this time in real estate.
Peter Thiel (Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future)
The goal - at least the way I think about entrepreneurship - is you realize one day that you can't really work anyone else. You have to start your won thing. It almost doesn't matter what the thing is. We had six different business plan changes, and then the last one was PayPal. If that one didn't work out, if we still had the money and the people, obviously we would not have given up. We would have iterated on the business model and done something else. I don't think there was ever clarity as to who we were until we knew it was working. By then, we'd figured out our PR pitch and told everyone what we do and who we are. But between the founding and the actual PayPal, it was just like this tug-of-war where it was like, "We're trying this, this week." Every week you go to investors and say, "We're doing this, exactly this. We're really focused. We're going to be huge." The next week you're like, "That was a lie.
Jessica Livingston (Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days)
a great business is defined by its ability to generate cash flows in the future. Investors expect Twitter will be able to capture monopoly profits over the next decade, while newspapers’ monopoly days are over.
Peter Thiel (Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future)
creating a company for acquisition or IPO is different from building a profitable enterprise; it’s about building a sellable enterprise. Startups are not trying to earn revenue (which is a liability); they are setting themselves up to win more capital. They are not part of the real economy or even the real world but part of the process through which working assets are converted into new stockpiles of dead ones. That’s all they have really accomplished with whatever digital fad they’ve foisted onto the market or sold to yesterday’s tech winners. They thought they were engineering a new technology, when they were actually engineering a reallocation of capital. That’s why digital entrepreneurs who do win often end up becoming the next generation of venture capitalists. Everyone from Marc Andreessen (Netscape) to Sean Parker (Napster) to Peter Thiel (PayPal) to Jack Dorsey (Twitter) now runs venture funds of his own. Facebook and Google, once startups themselves, now acquire more businesses than they incubate internally. With each new generation, firms and investors leverage the startup economy more deliberately, or even cynically. After all, a win is a win.
Douglas Rushkoff (Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity)
Try to avoid single-trigger acceleration for nonfounders whenever possible. Not only is it sure to cause issues during M&A (the acquirer will be worried that everyone will vest and leave after the transaction), but an acquirer may make changing these terms a condition of a deal, which just leads to ugliness when you inform people that they no longer are getting the deal that you promised them (or telling the investors that you’re scuttling the sale of your company because Chris in sales wants more money).
Dan Shapiro (Hot Seat: The Startup CEO Guidebook)
When people gamble, but they don’t tell themselves they’re gambling (as investors do), they need information to justify their decisions, and they need social proof and examples and evidence that they’re doing the right thing.
Gabriel Weinberg (Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers)
1. You can create the aura of exclusivity with an invite-only feature (as Mailbox did). 2. You can create hundreds of fake profiles to make your service look more popular and active than it actually is—nothing draws a crowd like a crowd (as reddit did in its early days). 3. You can target a single service or platform and cater to it exclusively—essentially piggybacking off or even stealing someone else’s growth (as PayPal did with eBay). 4. You can launch for just a small group of people, own that market, and then move from host to host until your product spreads like a virus (which is what Facebook did by starting in colleges—first at Harvard—before taking on the rest of the population). 5. You can host cool events and drive your first users through the system manually (as Myspace, Yelp, and Udemy all did). 6. You can absolutely dominate the App Store because your product provides totally new features that everyone is dying for (which is what Instagram did—twenty-five thousand downloads on its first day—and later Snapchat). 7. You can bring on influential advisors and investors for their valuable audience and fame rather than their money (as About.me and Trippy did—a move that many start-ups have emulated). 8. You can set up a special sub-domain on your e-commerce site where a percentage of every purchase users make goes to a charity of their choice (which is what Amazon did with Smile.Amazon.com this year to great success, proving that even a successful company can find little growth hacks).
Ryan Holiday (Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising)
Driving the move is a focus by Beijing on the Internet and innovation-driven sectors to boost slowing growth by easing listing rules. Another factor is a stock rally that has seen the Shanghai Composite Index climb 43% this year, although it fell 6.5% on Thursday. Meanwhile, Chinese investors are pouring money into funds that target startups. In 2014, 39 angel investment funds were set up in China, raising $1.07 billion, a 143% increase from the previous high in 2012, according to investment database pedata.cn, which is run by Zero2IPO Research in Beijing. Angel investors typically provide personal funds to finance small startups. High valuations and the loosening of listing rules will draw more Chinese companies to their home market, said Jianbin Gao of PricewaterhouseCoopers in China. “We anticipate significant growth in technology listings on domestic exchanges,” he said.
Anonymous
The only thing that we know about financial predictions of startups is that 100 percent of them are wrong. If you can predict the future accurately, we have a few suggestions for other things you could be doing besides starting a risky early stage company. Furthermore, the earlier stage the startup, the less accurate any predications will be. While we know you can't predict your revenue with any degree of accuracy (although we are always very pleased in that rare case where revenue starts earlier and grows faster than expected), the expense side of your financial plan is very instructive as to how you think about the business. You can't predict your revenue with any level of precision, but you should be able to manage your expenses exactly to plan. Your financials will mean different things to different investors. In our case, we focus on two things: (1) the assumptions underlying the revenue forecast (which we don't need a spreadsheet for—we'd rather just talk about them) and (2) the monthly burn rate or cash consumption of the business. Since your revenue forecast will be wrong, your cash flow forecast will be wrong. However, if you are an effective manager, you'll know how to budget for this by focusing on lagging your increase in cash spend behind your expected growth in revenue.
Brad Feld (Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist)
She reverse engineered a startup based on market conditions, industry trends, and nascent investor fads.
Douglas Rushkoff (Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity)
What’s more important than making a startup attractive to investors in a beauty-contest format is to make them viable in real life.
Guy Kawasaki (The Art of the Start 2.0: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything)
When assessing a startup for funding, investors typically categorize three major risk areas: Technology risk: Will it work? Market risk: Will people buy the product? Execution risk: Is the team able to function and pivot as needed?
Salim Ismail (Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours (and what to do about it))
Don’t expect investors to be throwing millions on the table for you to go off and buy a bigger house, get a new car, party half the week away, and generally upgrade your lifestyle.
Alejandro Cremades (The Art of Startup Fundraising)
In most cases, startups that try to enter a hot market have lower performance than those that avoid chasing the latest trend.25
Ethan Mollick (The Unicorn's Shadow: Combating the Dangerous Myths that Hold Back Startups, Founders, and Investors)
Start with the resources you have today and leap into starting your business based on what you can do better than anyone else. Don’t wait for the objectively perfect idea; embrace the idea that only you can implement right now.
Ethan Mollick (The Unicorn's Shadow: Combating the Dangerous Myths that Hold Back Startups, Founders, and Investors)
The culture that a founder creates is one of the most durable aspects of the company, outlasting the founder itself and carrying on the tradition of the firm.
Ethan Mollick (The Unicorn's Shadow: Combating the Dangerous Myths that Hold Back Startups, Founders, and Investors)
The most successful investors in start-up companies have a majority of bad results. If you applied to NASA’s astronaut program or the NBC page program, both of which have drawn thousands of applicants for a handful of positions, things will go your way a minority of the time, but you didn’t necessarily do anything wrong. Don’t fall in love or even date anybody if you want only positive results. The world is structured to give us lots of opportunities to feel bad about being wrong if we want to measure ourselves by outcomes. Don’t fall for it!
Annie Duke (Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts)
By late 2017, Theranos was running on fumes, having burned through most of the $900 million it raised from investors, much of it on legal expenses.
John Carreyrou (Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup)
The ideal, of course, is to hire an executive with past experience at a blitzscaling start-up that has already dealt with the challenges your company currently faces. This is why investors have more confidence in serial entrepreneurs. One of the major advantages that companies in Silicon Valley enjoy is generations of rapidly scaling companies that have produced a rich supply of executives with blitzscaling experience. Yet even if you can’t land an ideal candidate, second best is to hire a manager who has previously worked with successful executives in a very rapidly growing company, or an executive who earned her executive experience at a larger or more traditional business but who also worked at a blitzscaling start-up at another time in her career.
Reid Hoffman (Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies)
The number one reason a startup shuts down is not actually running out of money, which is what most people believe. The number one reason a startup fails is that the founder gives up.
Jason Calacanis (Angel: How to Invest in Technology Startups—Timeless Advice from an Angel Investor Who Turned $100,000 into $100,000,000)
What Are Skills? Skills are the capabilities developed through training or hands-on experience. Skills are the practical application of knowledge. Someone can take a course on investing and gain knowledge of it. But only experience in trading gives them the skills. What Are Abilities? Abilities, often confused with skills, are the innate traits or talents that you bring to a task or situation. Many people can learn to negotiate competently by acquiring knowledge and practicing skills. But a few are brilliant negotiators because they have an innate ability to persuade. What Are Assets? Assets are funds you have saved up or that you acquire through loans, investors, or fund-raising. So how do assets work with everything else to push your business from idea into reality? Take a look at the example below. This is what I call the knowledge, skills, abilities, and assets matrix:
Ramesh Dontha (The 60 Minute Startup)
Private companies, especially startups, are very risky investments. The 90 percent failure rate keeps most types of investors away from the field.
Rand Fishkin (Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World)
But as a founder, it’s critical to keep in mind your motivations and how they align with those of your investors.
Rand Fishkin (Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World)
The best entrepreneurs … know how to tell an amazing story that will convince talent and investors to join in on the journey.
Rand Fishkin (Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World)
startup founders, investors, and pundits as evidence that finding the right, innovative “hack” has replaced classic marketing practices as the way new companies can and should achieve sky-high growth rates.
Rand Fishkin (Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World)
success theater”—the work we do to make ourselves look successful. We could have tried marketing gimmicks, bought a Super Bowl ad, or tried flamboyant public relations (PR) as a way of juicing our gross numbers. That would have given investors the illusion of traction, but only for a short time.
Eric Ries (The Lean Startup: The Million Copy Bestseller Driving Entrepreneurs to Success)
An MIT study found that Twitter users who followed diverse groups of people were better at generating ideas than those with closed networks.
Ethan Mollick (The Unicorn's Shadow: Combating the Dangerous Myths that Hold Back Startups, Founders, and Investors)
In fact, the best evidence we have about testing ideas shows that founders who use a disciplined, scientific process are more likely to succeed.
Ethan Mollick (The Unicorn's Shadow: Combating the Dangerous Myths that Hold Back Startups, Founders, and Investors)
As a venture-capital investor, I see a particularly strong role for a new kind of impact investing. I foresee a venture ecosystem emerging that views the creation of humanistic service-sector jobs as a good in and of itself. It will steer money into human-focused service projects that can scale up and hire large numbers of people: lactation consultants for postnatal care, trained coaches for youth sports, gatherers of family oral histories, nature guides at national parks, or conversation partners for the elderly. Jobs like these can be meaningful on both a societal and personal level, and many of them have the potential to generate real revenue—just not the 10,000 percent returns that come from investing in a unicorn technology startup.
Kai-Fu Lee (AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order)
But Silicon Valley has a dark side. To be sure, there are plenty of shiny, happy people working in tech. But this is also a world where wealth is distributed unevenly and benefits accrue mostly to investors and founders, who have rigged the game in their favor.
Dan Lyons (Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble)
By the occasion of the inaugural Fearless Friday I’ve come to realize that HubSpot is just as crazy as the rest of them. But all of HubSpot’s lofty bullshit about inspiring people and being remarkable and creating lovable content might actually be part of a cynical, and almost brilliant, strategy. HubSpot is playing the game, saying the kind of ridiculous things that investors now expect to hear from start-ups. HubSpot is feeding the ducks.
Dan Lyons (Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble)
Consider this appeal for an appointment: “Mr. Smith, this is Bob Jones. I’m with First Advantage Venture Fund, and I want to see if I could get ten minutes on your calendar so I can show you how we can work with you in the future.” Remember, new companies aren’t the only parties who can be needy. Some start-ups are well funded and choosy regarding any venture capitalist they may bring in. The investors can also get into the needy mode, just as Bob Jones did while more or less begging for this appointment. Bob should have said: “Bill, my name is Bob Jones. I’m not quite sure that we as a venture fund fit where you’re going. I just don’t know. What I’d like to do is meet with you so we can see where you’re going and you can look at where we’re going at First Advantage and see if there’s a fit. When’s the best time on your calendar?
Jim Camp (Start with No: The Negotiating Tools that the Pros Don't Want You to Know)
This is the New Work, but really it is just a new twist on an old story, the one about labor being exploited by capital. The difference is that this time the exploitation is done with a big smiley face. Everything about this new workplace, from the crazy décor to the change-the-world rhetoric to the hero’s journey mythology and the perks that are not really perks—all of these things exist for one reason, which is to drive down the cost of labor so that investors can maximize their return.
Dan Lyons (Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble)
Those I call are very different from Orphans in that they’re absolutely convinced they’re some sort of social wit. Without a doubt they’re intelligent, and most likely very wealthy, although their wealth will come from a business they were set up in by others from their ‘school.’ They’ll have had no need to go to university. Rich people will have set them up in business, possibly Public Relations or something like that, they’ll have helped them write a business plan, loaned them money, and provided advice and guidance at every step of the way. As I say, money would have been forthcoming from investors until the business was able to run itself. And then Horace will swan about as if he did it all himself.
Karl Wiggins (Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe)
Investors. Media. Employees. Fellow entrepreneurs. Startup enclaves. They push us to “go big or go home.
Rand Fishkin (Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World)
Startups require a a freewheeling environment, devoid of any stifling policies where angel investors and VCs can put up capital to nurture wild dreams of young inexperienced entreprenurs. Policy framework has to acknolwledge that. Indian bureaucracy is a successor to British Civil Service, who job it was to suppress Indian spirit and extract revenues.
Ranjan Mistry
To initiate its EIR program, USCIS would also turn to an agitator. Brad Feld, an early-stage investor and prolific blogger, had become exasperated when officers of two promising startups under his watch were forced to return to their home countries because they couldn’t secure visas. He shared their story on a blog, attracting the attention of other entrepreneurs, including Ries, who couldn’t understand why there was no visa category for an entrepreneur with American investors and employees. In lieu of that category, many entrepreneurs were at the mercy of visa examiners who didn’t understand how they operated. At the point of visa application, many startups had not hired many employees or generated much revenue. This confused traditional visa examiners, who would then ask odd and irrelevant questions, often before a denial. To give just one example, it’s been years since AOL required a compact disc to use its service. And yet, visa examiners were demanding proof of a warehouse, where software startups would store their CD inventory for shipping to customers. As Feld’s idea of a “startup visa” became intertwined with, and paralyzed by, the broader debate on comprehensive immigration reform, the USCIS, with White House support, sought to accomplish something administratively within the existing law. It instituted an EIR program, to organize and educate a specialty unit of immigration officers to handle entrepreneur and startup nonimmigrant visa cases.22 The project also called for educating entrepreneurs about the available options, one of which they may have overlooked. For instance, the O-1 visa, which was reserved “for those with extraordinary ability,” had proven a successful channel for actors, athletes, musicians, directors, scientists, artists, businessmen, engineers, and others who could provide ample evidence of their unique and impressive abilities, attributes, awards, and accolades. It had even created some controversy, when visa evaluators took the term “model” to an extreme, awarding a visa to one of Hugh Hefner’s ex-girlfriends, a Playboy centerfold from Canada named Shera Berchard.23 If she was confident enough to assert and explain her “extraordinary ability,” why weren’t entrepreneurs?
Aneesh Chopra (Innovative State: How New Technologies Can Transform Government)
Keep in mind that pitching investors is a process that requires preparation, data, vision, and honesty. And even if an investor passes on this particular start-up, don’t burn the bridge.
Ziad K. Abdelnour (StartUp Saboteurs: How Incompetence, Ego, and Small Thinking Prevent True Wealth Creation)
less than two months after Ke Jie resigned his last game to AlphaGo, the Chinese central government issued an ambitious plan to build artificial intelligence capabilities. It called for greater funding, policy support, and national coordination for AI development. It set clear benchmarks for progress by 2020 and 2025, and it projected that by 2030 China would become the center of global innovation in artificial intelligence, leading in theory, technology, and application. By 2017, Chinese venture-capital investors had already responded to that call, pouring record sums into artificial intelligence startups and making up 48 percent of all AI venture funding globally, surpassing the United States for the first time.
Kai-Fu Lee (AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order)
Ripple has been a popular startup for incumbents to work with, and some of them are creating projects that utilize its native asset, XRP. Incumbents such as Bank of America, RBC, Santander, BMO, CIBC, ATB Financial, and more use Ripple’s blockchain-based technology to achieve faster and more secure financial transactions. 15 If realized, these efforts could not only reward the companies that utilize Ripple but also potentially benefit Ripple’s own cryptoasset, XRP, which can be used as a bridge currency to help settlements on the Ripple network.
Chris Burniske (Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond)
But no matter how unambiguous the end result of the power law, it doesn’t reflect daily experience. Since investors spend most of their time making new investments and attending to companies in their early stages, most of the companies they work with are by definition average. Most of the differences that investors and entrepreneurs perceive every day are between relative levels of success, not between exponential dominance and failure. And since nobody wants to give up on an investment, VCs usually spend even more time on the most problematic companies than they do on the most obviously successful.
Peter Thiel (Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future)
The product launch and first customer ship dates are merely the dates when a product development team thinks the product’s first release is “finished.” It doesn’t mean the company understands its customers or how to market or sell to them, yet in almost every startup, ready or not, departmental clocks are set irrevocably to “first customer ship.” Even worse, a startup’s investors are managing their financial expectations by this date as well.
Steve Blank (The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company)
The method I recommend is called innovation accounting, a quantitative approach that allows us to see whether our engine-tuning efforts are bearing fruit. It also allows us to create learning milestones, which are an alternative to traditional business and product milestones. Learning milestones are useful for entrepreneurs as a way of assessing their progress accurately and objectively; they are also invaluable to managers and investors who must hold entrepreneurs accountable.
Eric Ries (The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses)
The evidence summarized in this matrix may be of some use to venture capital investors, as a general way to frame the riskiness of proposed investments. It suggests that start-ups which propose to commercialize a breakthrough technology that is essentially sustaining in character have a far lower likelihood of success than start-ups whose vision is to use proven technology to disrupt an established industry with something that is simpler, more reliable, and more convenient.
Clayton M. Christensen (The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail)
The indefiniteness of finance can be bizarre. Think about what happens when successful entrepreneurs sell their company. What do they do with the money? In a financialized world, it unfolds like this: • The founders don’t know what to do with it, so they give it to a large bank. • The bankers don’t know what to do with it, so they diversify by spreading it across a portfolio of institutional investors. • Institutional investors don’t know what to do with their managed capital, so they diversify by amassing a portfolio of stocks. • Companies try to increase their share price by generating free cash flows. If they do, they issue dividends or buy back shares and the cycle repeats. At no point does anyone in the chain know what to do with money in the real economy. But in an indefinite world, people actually prefer unlimited optionality; money is more valuable than anything you could possibly do with it. Only in a definite future is money a means to an end, not the end itself.
Peter Thiel (Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future)
working on something—do you want to see a pitch?” Hornik specialized in Internet companies, so he seemed like an ideal investor to Shader. The interest was mutual. Most people who pitch ideas are first-time entrepreneurs, with no track record of success. In contrast, Shader was a blue-chip entrepreneur who had hit the jackpot not once, but twice. In 1999, his first start-up, Accept.com, was acquired by Amazon for $175
Adam M. Grant (Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success)
On March 31, 2016, Securities and Exchange Commission chair Mary Jo White said this to the students of Stanford Law School: Nearly all venture valuations are highly subjective. But, one must wonder whether the publicity and pressure to achieve the unicorn benchmark is analogous to that felt by public companies to meet projections they make to the market with the attendant risk of financial reporting problems. And, yes that remains a problem. We continue to see instances of public companies and their senior executives manipulating their accounting to meet various expectations and projections.1 We have reached a point in the world of technology startups where the fervor for building a company with a billion-dollar valuation — the elusive startup unicorn — is overshadowing the creation of real value. It is not the first time we have been here; the world of startups and venture capital has always run in cycles, from optimistic zeal to caution to post-catastrophe introspection and back again. But perhaps it is time that entrepreneurs and investors alike begin waking up to the fact that the “valuation-at-all-costs” model, with its relentless pressure, remote odds of success, and human cost, is not only unsustainable but bad business. At this point in the current cycle, the radically overvalued startup appears to be headed for the endangered species list. That is a good thing. While billion-dollar behemoths will always exist, and the high-wire act of chasing scale while also chasing the cash to fund that scale will occasionally produce a solid company, there are other ways to build a business. There are better ways to build a business.
Brian de Haaff (Lovability: How to Build a Business That People Love and Be Happy Doing It)
In all the focus on political instability in the region, less examined is that many countries have adopted restrictive internet access and privacy laws. This includes business-friendly Dubai and lean-forward tech center Jordan. Often described as necessary steps in areas like press-and-publications law in order to protect libel concerns, these restrictions are usually vaguely worded and subject to wide and opportunistic interpretation. On the ground, entrepreneurs and investors alike view these as moves that risk chilling business development in their promising ecosystems. Jordan’s
Christopher M. Schroeder (Startup Rising: The Entrepreneurial Revolution Remaking the Middle East)
Groupon is a study of the hazards of pursuing scale and valuation at all costs. In 2010, Forbes called it the “fastest growing company ever” after its founders raised $135 million in funding, giving Groupon a valuation of more than $1 billion after just 17 months.5 The company turned down a $6 billion acquisition offer from Google and went public in 2011 with one of the biggest IPOs since Google’s in 2004.6 It was one of the original unicorns. However, the business model had serious problems. Groupon sometimes sold so many Daily Deals that participating businesses were overwhelmed . . . even crippled. Other businesses accused Groupon of strong-arming them to sign up for Daily Deals. Customers started to view the group discount (the company’s bread and butter) as a sign that a participating business was desperate. Businesses stopped signing up. Journalists suggested that Groupon was prioritizing customer acquisition over retention — growth over value — and that it had gone public before it had a solid, proven business model.7 Groupon is still a player, with just over $3 billion in annual revenue in 2015. But its stock has fallen from $26 a share to about $4 today, and it has withdrawn from many international markets. Also revealing is that the company is suing IBM for patent infringement, something that will not create customer value.8 Many promising startups have paid the price for rushing to scale. We can see clues to potential future failures in the recent “down rounds” (stock purchases priced at a lower valuation than those of previous investors) hitting companies like Foursquare, Gilt Group, Jet, Jawbone, and Technorati. In their rush to build scale, executives and founders search for shortcuts to sustainable, long-term revenue growth.
Brian de Haaff (Lovability: How to Build a Business That People Love and Be Happy Doing It)
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several marquee investors have invested billions of dollars on Indian start-ups which have burnt all the cash without creating any value. Now these investments are expectedly going bad and the investors want to save their money at any cost, including seeking support from the government. Their patriotic story is that they are saving India—and Indian companies, which are actually owned by American, Chinese, Japanese and Russian investors—from American companies. Quite weird.
K. Vaitheeswaran (Failing to Succeed: The Story of India’s First E-Commerce Company)
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To anticipate likely sources of misalignment in any company, it’s useful to distinguish between three concepts: • Ownership: who legally owns a company’s equity? • Possession: who actually runs the company on a day-to-day basis? • Control: who formally governs the company’s affairs? A typical startup allocates ownership among founders, employees, and investors. The managers and employees who operate the company enjoy possession. And a board of directors, usually comprising founders and investors, exercises control.
Peter Thiel (Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future)
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Paul Graham is someone who tends to make bold statements about innovation and the economics of technology. He co-founded Y-Combinator and what would later become Yahoo! Store. As someone who studied painting and computer science, he writes from a unique perspective as is displayed in Hackers & Painters and his well-known essays. “How to Start a Startup” offered me a basic toolkit to grasp that people, great execution and understanding what the customer really wants, are more important than a brilliant idea. “Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas” let me know that although some founders can seem promising, they may have simply chosen the wrong problem to solve and it may be best to wait for their next new iteration—or business—entirely.
Bradley Miles (#BreakIntoVC: How to Break Into Venture Capital And Think Like an Investor Whether You're a Student, Entrepreneur or Working Professional (Venture Capital Guidebook Book 1))
Do Things That Don’t Scale” taught me the importance of the ‘dirty work’ startups have to accomplish in the early days, like focusing on a deliberately narrow market to test the product or going out of their way to acquire users, and make them happy with insane attention-to-detail as if they’re a consultant with only one client. These are just three of the 174 essays currently on Paul’s site. There are a few resources that summarize the content or present a “Top 10,” but at this stage I think the best move is to read the above blogs and a few other articles where the title catches your eye.
Bradley Miles (#BreakIntoVC: How to Break Into Venture Capital And Think Like an Investor Whether You're a Student, Entrepreneur or Working Professional (Venture Capital Guidebook Book 1))
Sam Altman is the current president of Y-Combinator and was previously a founder at Loopt, which sold to Green Dot Corporation for $ 43M. As head of YC, Sam often dispenses an entire guide’s worth of information through his blog. Sam’s “Startup Playbook” will walk you through everything a great startup should have from ideation to product instantiation, and is an invaluable tool for aspiring venture investors. Additionally, Sam’s been kind enough to host the 20-episode video series, How to Start a Startup—originally a lecture at Stanford—on his blog. The series includes talks from luminaries like Paul Graham, Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz and Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn.
Bradley Miles (#BreakIntoVC: How to Break Into Venture Capital And Think Like an Investor Whether You're a Student, Entrepreneur or Working Professional (Venture Capital Guidebook Book 1))
Some of the most noted angel investors are Alexis Ohanian (founder of Reddit), Marc Benioff (founder of Salesforce) and Max Levchin (founder of Paypal, Slide and Affirm) who on occasion invest in early stage and growth rounds as well. If the core product of the business begins to gain market share, and it seems the company has a lasting opportunity to scale and become an emerging leader, investors like First Round Capital and 500 Startups step in at the seed or Series A round. Growth equity firms like Stripes Group, General Atlantic and Insight Venture Partners typically come in at the Series C or D stage when the business becomes the number one or two player in the industry and is ripe for an IPO or strategic acquisition.
Bradley Miles (#BreakIntoVC: How to Break Into Venture Capital And Think Like an Investor Whether You're a Student, Entrepreneur or Working Professional (Venture Capital Guidebook Book 1))
A lot of us asked why we weren't pricing it at a premium. We could have got a premium but Deepak said, "leave money on the table for investors. They will appreciate this in the long term." Today, when we have arguments with our promoters, one of the big lessons I learnt from our float is to price an IPO cheap,' Luis said. 'Should we really scalp the shareholders? This is a start-up company. On what basis are we putting valuations? Today they will put a valuation even on a start-up idea,' Satwalekar was blunt in his assessment.
Tamal Bandopadhyaya (A Bank for the Buck)