A Quote by Peter Fenton
We actually tried to invest in Twitter in April 2007, right when it launched. At the time, the company was wary of having a classic, tier-one traditional venture firm involved.
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I would have loved to invest in Salesforce when I was active in venture. I didn't know the founder, Marc Benioff, well enough, and he didn't really rely on venture capital, but I remember the first time I met him and got to talk about Salesforce when they were still private. I thought, 'Damn, that is going to be a huge company.'
I would be horrible at Twitter. I wouldn't know the answer to fans' questions half the time - and the patience involved! I couldn't imagine. I did have a Twitter account that I tried for a couple days, but found I had nothing to say.
Graduating business school, I had $150,000 of debt. An investment firm offered me a steady job, but it didn't feel right. It was 2007 in Silicon Valley, and I dreamed of starting an Internet company.
Nominally, I stated a company. Practically, it's a venture capital firm that allows me to be an investor in early stage companies.
Probably, if I created a venture fund, I would create a firm with virtual services not too different from the a16z model, but without employing people. So I would get CPOs, engineering talent, marketing people who wanted to be involved with the venture fund and provide services.
Shareholder activism is not a privilege - it is a right and a responsibility. When we invest in a company, we own part of that company and we are partly responsible for how that company progresses. If we believe there is something going wrong with the company, then we, as shareholders, must become active and vocal.
There are certain kinds of second-tier confrontations which the U.S. does not need to get directly involved in. However, even in the second tier of problems, our intervention as a friend to both sides is important.
I often say Policy Planning is very analogous to a venture capital firm. A venture capital firm sees an interesting idea and puts money behind it; in Policy Planning, we look for promising ideas and then put contacts and relationships behind it.
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.
It's all about being comfortable, being easy and having you be able to wear something and not having it wear you. It's classic. Every time I've tried to be bold and crazy, I feel like a Japanese animated cartoon character.
We don't want two-tier health care in Canada - one tier for Quebec and another tier for the rest of the country.
Camera companies, like traditional phone manufacturers, dismissed the iPhone as a toy when it launched in 2007. Nokia thought that the iPhone used inferior technology; the camera makers thought that it took lousy pictures. Neither thought that they had anything to worry about.
Everybody has something now. It's become very over-saturated, and it's hard to weed out what's good, what you should watch and what you have time to watch. And Twitter was much less crowded, at the time, and it was an easier way to reach people. So, the combination of having a great video, a lot more access to people through Twitter, and having Kickstarter be this new thing in. We tapped into it, at its inception, and got people interested in it just based on the concept of what Kickstarter was. The timing was right.
I believe Twitter, right now, is just finishing the venture capital phase, getting into a maturity level.
When I was working at Gilt, a lot of people at the time - this is back in 2009; Gilt launched in 2007 - were making their first fashion purchases online and at a discount.
The big advantage that we have as a venture capital firm over a hedge fund or a mutual fund is we have a 13-year lockup on our money. And so enterprise can go in and out of fashion four different times, and we can go and invest in one of these companies, and it's okay, because we can stay the course.
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