Top 994 Venture Capitalists Quotes & Sayings

First of all, the majority of us, regardless of what we may say, are capitalists. That is, we practice it, it's what we "do," it's how we live, we are capitalists.

What do you get when you cross a herd of sheep with a herd of lemmings? A herd of venture capitalists.

I've had a lot of help... from Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, venture capitalists. They've helped me out a ton.

Private equity firms working closely with venture capitalists and technologists may be able to unlock assets that others have not leveraged and build technology cultures to iterate on solutions that make these assets more productive.

Silicon Valley has evolved a critical mass of engineers and venture capitalists and all the support structure - the law firms, the real estate, all that - that are all actually geared toward being accepting of startups.

Venture capitalists are like lemmings jumping on the software bandwagon.

There is a lack of female venture capitalists, and so there are fewer female-oriented businesses getting funded. Intel has done a good job of creating a message across Intel, and they are putting their money where their mouth is.

A fool and his money will soon be departed applies equally to venture capitalists as it does to everyone else.

The government is somewhat inept, but the private sector is inept in general. How many companies do venture capitalists invest in that go poorly? By far most of them. However, every once in a while a Google or a Microsoft comes out, so people keep giving them money.

Revolution is profitable. So the capitalists sell it... The hip capitalists have some allies within the revolutionary community: longhairs who work as intermediaries between the kids on the street and the millionaire businessmen.

Back in the late 1990s, venture capitalists got very excited about the Internet. A whole lot of money was poured into some companies that failed rather spectacularly, and a lot of people lost a lot of money.

Unfortunately, a lot of Silicon Valley venture capitalists are disconnected from African Americans, Latinos, and other people of color.

The more successful capitalists are in cutting their wage costs, the less money workers will have to buy back what those same capitalists produce. It's a contradiction.

Generally speaking, experience counts for something. So you'd expect entrepreneurs who've been through the ups and downs of a tech startup to have an advantage over the newcomers. Or at least have an equal chance at success. But in fact the opposite may be true. A number of venture capitalists I've spoken with have said that too many "old guard" entrepreneurs are not being bold enough in their business decisions, and it's hurting their startups.

A startup job is an investment, after all: Venture capitalists may wager money, but you're staking something more precious - your time. And unlike VCs, you can't spread your risk by betting on a bunch of companies at once. Start with TAM. That's 'total addressable market,' and if it's not big enough, there's no point in talking.

When I started InMobi, I was on the road raising funds. I faced 20 rejections. But when I got the funds, they came from best venture capitalists.

Labour, because it chose to remain unintelligent, either became subservient, or insolently believed in damaging the capitalists' goods and machinery or even in killing the capitalists.

Investors are always biased to invest in things they themselves understand. So venture capitalists like Uber because they like driving in black town cars. They don't like Airbnb because they like staying in five-star hotels, not sleeping on people's couches.

We weren’t trying to strike it rich with Firefox. It’s open source and it’s free. We weren’t trying to take over the world; we had kind of modest goals, and it was OK if it failed. We were a lot freer to make risky decisions. If you can afford to do things that way, it’s just so much better. You’re not thinking about venture capitalists or marketing or sales. Just product and users, all day every day.

Some of my best friends are Venture Capitalists, but let's face it, a hamster with Alzheimer's could make those kind of numbers. It's great work if you can get it.

The more activity around Chicago-based companies, and the more success that entrepreneurs have in Chicago, the better we as venture capitalists in Chicago will do.

To venture causes anxiety. Not to venture is to lose oneself.

There's this myopia among American venture capitalists to not go anywhere beyond Silicon Valley and New York.

In many cases, women are being harassed by people who are on their board or who are associated with one of their venture capitalists.

The most important question venture capitalists ask is what prevents your company from growing faster.

The great danger of dealing with venture capitalists is the 'slow maybe'.

True innovation takes at least 10 to 15 years, whereas the longest that private venture capitalists are routinely willing to wait is five years. They don't join the game until all the riskiest plays have already been made - by governments.

Venture capitalists Justin Caldbeck of Binary Capital, Steve Jurvetson of DFJ, and Dave McClure of 500 Startups all left their firms following accusations of misconduct.

Society can't wait. It's sad there are so many entrepreneurs, business successes and venture capitalists who give no thought to society.

The anomaly is that, as a publishing venture, comics are not doing very well. As a venture that supplies other media, they're incredible.

First of all, in terms of investment in Internet-related developments, venture capitalists - once burned - are now very cautious and are investing in areas that actually make business sense.

You have venture capitalists. We view them as experts who also help finance your company and give directions and also some pretty candid discussions about what you have to do better.

There are self-styled "anarcho-capitalists" (not to be confused with anarchists of any persuasion), who want the state abolished as a regulator of capitalism, and government handed over to capitalists.

Many venture capitalists say they're looking for the next big idea. But they aren't, really; they're looking for something derivative, because derivative is safe.

Venture capitalists certainly create value for themselves, but they also singularly create value for the rest of the world.

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.

Capitalists behave like capitalists wherever they are. They pursue the expansion of value through exploitation without regard to the social consequences.

President Obama's assault on the free-enterprise market and venture capitalists is anti-American and shows his greatest insecurity: his lack of private sector experience and his inability to understand the economy and help businesses thrive in these uncertain economic times.

What is called 'capitalism' might more accurately be called consumerism. It is the consumers who call the tune, and those capitalists who want to remain capitalists have to learn to dance to it.

You've got athletes who are politicians, venture capitalists, musicians, rappers, etcetera. It's becoming more of a popular thing to have other interests outside of basketball, and I think that's normal. Just like when people work day jobs, they have interest in sports, they do investments, they do all these other types of things.

At a basic level venture capitalists are arbitrageurs: they have access to more information than those with the capital, and access to more capital than those with information, and they profit by exploiting the mismatch.

A general charge of crony capitalism is easy to make. But dividing the 'bad' crony capitalists from the 'good' innovative entrepreneurs is much harder to do. And sorting them out without creating a new group of crony capitalists may be the hardest thing of all.

We have the greatest resource universities in the world, the only place in the world. We have the most productive workforce in the world. We have the most agile venture capitalists in the world. We have a situation where right now in the United States of America, we are near energy independent. North America is beginning to be the epicenter of energy. What is it that makes people think that this is not going to be the American century? I don't get it.

Venture capitalists don't pay attention to you unless you have an app or a widget.

When you have a failed pitch, you meet many more venture capitalists than you really want to.

Most venture capitalists won't read a business plan unless the entrepreneur is introduced to them by a contact.

When Japan was on the rise, American governors would come to inspect Toyota City and study 'just in time' manufacturing to increase efficiency; when America was at its peak in the late 1990s, the world beat a path to its venture capitalists.

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.

Most startup entrepreneurs unnecessarily spend half their time and give up half their equity in search of funding from angel investors and venture capitalists. Tens of millions of dollars are available to them for free from partners who not only don't want their equity, they don't even want to be paid back.

I remember in 2007, 2008, when we had the recession, there were all of these very gloomy emails sent from a lot of venture capitalists, saying, Don't expect to get funded.'

That first company I started made a lot of money for the venture capitalists - nearly $30 million - but next to nothing for the founders. The companies I started after that varied between failures and mediocre successes. But at no point did I ever consider getting a 'real job.' That felt like a black and white world, and I wanted Technicolor.

To venture causes anxiety, but not to venture is to lose one's self.... And to venture in the highest is precisely to be conscious of one's self.

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.

As a rule, large capitalists are Republicans and small capitalists are Democrats, but workingmen must remember that they are all capitalists, and that the many small ones, like the fewer large ones, are all politically supporting their class interests, and this is always and everywhere the capitalist class.

Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists.

I like most of the venture capitalists I know; they're smart, well-intended guys who genuinely enjoy helping entrepreneurs succeed. And I love venture capital and investment capital of all categories - its economic impact is proven. The more of it the better.

The chance to interact with big shots is drawing scads of aspiring entrepreneurs to Quora, along with venture capitalists and other Valley players.

Outsiders think of Silicon Valley as a success story, but in truth, it is a graveyard. Failure.. is Silicon Valley's greatest strength. Every failed product or enterprise is a lesson stored in the collective memory of the country. We not only don't stigmatize failure, sometime we even admire it. Venture Capitalists actually like to see a little failure in the resumes of entrepreneurs.

People tend to think that in order to start a new business they have to come up with something new and dazzling, but that's a myth - and it's often propagated by venture capitalists.

I want to kill the president because I no like the capitalists. I have the gun in my hand, I kill kings and presidents first and next all capitalists.