A Quote by Brad Feld
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.
Related Quotes
While I'm a venture capitalist who invests in early-stage tech companies, I often feel like a professional emailer and conference call maker.
You can invest in companies, you can help grow companies, you can be a venture capitalist - and be a philanthropist at the same time.
Nominally, I stated a company. Practically, it's a venture capital firm that allows me to be an investor in early stage companies.
Venture capitalists buy minority positions in young companies they think will grow quickly; buy-out investors buy most or all of companies they think can be turned around by fixing a few basic things.
When the trust is high, you get the trust dividend. Investors invest in brands people trust. Consumers buy more from companies they trust, they spend more with companies they trust, they recommend companies they trust, and they give companies they trust the benefit of the doubt when things go wrong.
Why do investors seem to care about 'billion dollar exits?' Historically, top venture funds have driven returns from their ownership in just a few companies in a given fund of many companies.
Trust-me companies are companies whose financial results gallop ahead of their businesses, companies with seemingly perfect control over their quarterly sales and profits. Companies whose financial statements are loaded with footnotes: companies that short-sellers often attack but rarely dent.
I think Wall Street is very important, especially to tech companies. Wall Street will get in their rhythm and go fund tech companies, and tech companies will go create jobs and employ a lot of people, so there's that aspect of Wall Street.
I've had to create companies that I believe in 100%. These are companies I feel will make a genuine difference. Then I have to be willing to find the time myself to talk about them, promote them and market them. I don't want to spend my life doing something that I'm not proud of.
I think that we can all learn from what smart companies are doing. My objective is to demonstrate what's possible, even during tough economic times. This is a period of great business dislocation, but that means it's also the time to try new things. This will be a challenge for existing companies. But the behaviors of smart companies can be learned.
We're pretty broad as investors. Our thesis is work with great entrepreneurs that believe they can change the world. But there are specific areas that we get excited about - areas like hard tech, deep tech, companies that deal with really difficult technology, etc.
If you think about companies that were built in Silicon Valley, a lot of them early on were chip companies. And now the companies that are there, like Apple, are much more successful than any of the chip companies were.
Brand marketers don't believe that ad-tech companies view brands as true partners. Ad-tech companies think brand marketers are paying attention to the wrong things. And publishers, with a few important exceptions, feel taken advantage of by everyone.
Usually, it's men who run these big monster companies, and girl companies are usually much smaller - it's like an unwritten tech-industry stigma.
While it's true that women are the minority in most tech companies, I don't think that inhibits entry into the tech space. My motto has always been, 'Live What You Love,' and as such, I think it's incredibly important to do work you believe in and to work for a company that has values that align with your own, be it in tech or another industry.
Many entrepreneurs, and the venture investors who back them, seek to build billion-dollar companies.
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