Top 79 Quotes & Sayings by Fred Wilson

Facebook is not an unstoppable juggernaut. There are a lot of other things people can do on the web.

The venture business is a bit of an apprenticeship business, so the firm I worked for didn't let me make an investment until I was 30. That was probably a very smart thing.

I'm a free speech bigot. I don't like censorship; I just don't think it's a good thing.

Start-ups should be hunch-driven early on and data-driven as they scale.

Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr are all 'User First, Brands Second' services. The brands are all over these services now. But for the most part, these services didn't do much to bring them. The engaged users did.

When I see people laughing at ideas and companies we have backed, I smile. It means we are going to make a lot of money on that investment.

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.

The Internet is a computing platform built on top of core technology. Applied technology is what gets built on top of that: It's Web services.

Foursquare's adoption of a game dynamic when it launched is a particularly clever implementation of a social hook.

Games are the most social of all things on the web.

The most common way customer financing is done is you sell the customer on the product before you've built it or before you've finished it. The customer puts up the money to build the product or finish the product and becomes your first customer. Usually the customer simply wants the product and nothing more.

It's upsetting to me that you have to be a millionaire to invest in your friend's start-up.

Skyping with your spouse works well enough, but apparently it is hard to get the kids to hang out on Skype for long.

People already love to play casual games. But when you take a casual game and stick it inside a social network, it becomes way more exciting.

Marketing is for companies who have sucky products.

If you are successful, you will be cloned. That's life. In fact, it's a sign that you've made it when clones of your website, mobile app, and business start cropping up.

When my dad was in Vietnam, we lost a parent for a year. Thank God we didn't lose a parent for good.

Given New York City's cultural diversity, it has always attracted creative people.

The best talent in the venture industry doesn't work in large companies and won't work in large companies.

Equity capital is expensive. Every time you do a raise, you dilute.

Internet and mobile product development cycles are measured in months, not years. And the capital required to get a product built and into the market is less than $1 million. And the returns, when things work out, can be enormous.

Money is information, like bits.

Investing in management means building communication systems, business processes, feedback, and routines that let you scale the business and team as efficiently as possible.

I don't like to talk about myself. I like to talk about stuff that's happening, stuff that's going to happen, and the people who are going to make it happen.

Many artists stick to making and hire a manager to focus on their business. Artists that build websites and mobile apps can do that, too.

Venture capital is about capturing the value between the startup phase and the public company phase.

I believe the mobile OS market will play out very similarly to Windows and Macintosh, with Android in the role of Windows. And so, if you want to be in front of the largest number of users, you need to be on Android.

The companies that do the best job on managing a user's privacy will be the companies that ultimately are the most successful.

So many folks in the venture capital business are sheep that just want to follow the herd. They are momentum investors purchasing highly illiquid investments. That is a recipe for disaster.

The Web is going to capture an increasing share of people's attention, and billions of dollars are going to flow in. What Web 2.0 is about is harnessing those dollars in highly leverageable ways.

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

One of the great things about young entrepreneurs is that they don't know that something can't be done. So they try something that's so audacious and usually end up pulling it off.

Not only do you have to put yourself in harms way in service of your country, you have to leave your families at home. It is a great sacrifice.

The more entrepreneurs in the world that are getting their ideas financed, the more great companies there are going to be that we can all invest in.

Twitter wasn't planned. It just happened.

Yahoo is free, it's fast and it's Web-centric. AOL is slow, it costs money and requires proprietary software.

Customers are a great way to finance a business for many reasons. First, customer financing is typically non dilutive. They want something from you other than equity in your business. Customers also help you fit your product to the market. And customers will help debug and improve the quality of the product.

It takes great salesmanship to convince a customer to buy something from you that isn't built or isn't finished.

Politics and government have been a terrible place to invest; education has been a terrible place to invest, but that is because the entrenched interests make it a terrible place to invest. The way you invest in those sectors is you go against the entrenched interests; you try and disrupt the entrenched interests, not to service them.

There are so many startups out there raising money. I don't think this is a bad thing. It's a good thing. Entrepreneurship is in vogue. Innovators are innovating. Makers are making.

When people laugh at a company or say, 'This is the stupidest thing I have ever heard,' you are listening.

I'm not saying M.B.A.s can't be great entrepreneurs. They can. But you don't need a degree to figure out it's costing you $5,000 per month to run your business, so you need $30,000 to keep it going for six more months.

I believe Android will be stronger in the developing world than it is in the developed world.

Building product is not about having a large team to manage. It is about having a small team with the right people on it.

Startups are rapidly changing systems. If you use an annual review cycle, you aren't getting feedback at the same pace that you need to adapt and change the business.

It's not easy for an entrepreneur to find the time to blog. But for those who do it, it is a great tool to communicate with the various stakeholders in their business and build a reputation for thought leadership.

I think 'crazy' is a compliment. I think you make money with people who are crazy.

The entire world is now a rival to Silicon Valley. No country, state, region, nor city has a lock on innovation in technology anymore.

New York's niche is content, and content is becoming more valuable. Just think about what is more valuable: MTV or the cable system that you use to get MTV? Howard Stern or the radio station you use to listen to him? Ultimately, technology becomes a commodity, and content - real, true branded content - becomes more valuable.

To see things differently requires you to be wired a little differently.

Certainly anything that is news or opinion needs to be free on the Web, because the Web is this very fluid medium that is very much driven by links and the flow of visitors through a discussion via links.

Being an entrepreneur is hard. Having supportive and caring investors helps.

There is a difference between hiring a CEO and turning over control of the business.

If you have a native monetization system where the atomic unit of content is the ad unit, that scales down all the way to a small screen experience. That's why Twitter is performing so well on mobile.

Most adults I know start their Internet session at Google, and most kids I know start their Internet session at either Facebook or MySpace.

I'm really interested in the intersection between reputation, identity, and knowledge.

We need new medical approaches to preventing and/or curing disease. We need new scientific approaches to generating, storing, and being more efficient with energy. Maybe we need more space exploration. Maybe we need more undersea exploration.

When there were not very many Internet companies, the supply of Internet companies to the market was small and the appetite for them was large. Therefore, if you were in the business of creating Internet companies in 1996-98, you had a market that provided massive demand for that.

My venture investing career has three phases, all roughly 6-8 years long. The first, at Euclid, was software to Internet. The second, at Flatiron, was Internet to bubble. And the third, at USV, has been web 2 to mobile. I have always used a new firm to denote a new investment phase for me. Throw away the old. Start with the new.

Board meetings should not be for the benefit of the board. They should be for the benefit of the CEO and the senior team.