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Quote by Edward R. Tufte

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Edward R. Tufte

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“You would think that this would be whether the entrepreneur’s idea is actually a good one. But finding a good idea is apparently not all that hard. Finding an entrepreneur who can execute a good idea is a different matter entirely. One needs a person who can take an idea from proposal to reality, work the long hours, build a team, handle the pressures and setbacks, manage technical and people problems alike, and stick with the effort for years on end without getting distracted or going insane. Such people are rare and extremely hard to spot.”

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Book:The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right
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“Indeed, the recurrent critiques of the lack of diversity of Silicon Valley's VC sector and the companies that it backs can be seen as a reflection of the importance of social capital. We might speculate that the reason VC's can seem like a clique is not because they the venture capitalists are unusually bad or cliquish people, but because the underlying model of the VC business thrives on dense social networks which will always tend to gravitate to cliquishness in the absence of the countervailing effort, and perhaps even then.”

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Book:Capitalism without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy
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“Research and development conducted by private companies in the United States has grown enormously over the past four decades. We have substantially replaced the publicly funded science that drove our growth after World War II with private research efforts. Such private R&D has shown some impressive results, including high average returns for the corporate sector. However, despite their enormous impact, these private R&D investments are much too small from a broader perspective. This is not a criticism of any individuals; rather, it is simply a feature of the system. Private companies do not capture the spillovers that their R&D efforts create for other corporations, so private sector executives in established firms underinvest in invention. The venture capital industry, which provides admirable support to some start-ups, is focused on fast-impact industries, such as information technology, and not generally on longer-run and capital-intensive investments like clean energy or new cell and gene therapies. Leading entrepreneur-philanthropists get this. In recent years, there have been impressive investments in science funded by publicly minded individuals, including Eric Schmidt, Elon Musk, Paul Allen, Bill and Melinda Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Bloomberg, Jon Meade Huntsman Sr., Eli and Edythe Broad, David H. Koch, Laurene Powell Jobs, and others (including numerous private foundations). The good news is that these people, with a wide variety of political views on other matters, share the assessment that science—including basic research—is of fundamental importance for the future of the United States. The less good news is that even the wealthiest people on the planet can barely move the needle relative to what the United States previously invested in science. America is, roughly speaking, a $20 trillion economy; 2 percent of our GDP is nearly $400 billion per year. Even the richest person in the world has a total stock of wealth of only around $100 billion—a mark broken in early 2018 by Jeff Bezos of Amazon, with Bill Gates and Warren Buffett in close pursuit. If the richest Americans put much of their wealth immediately into science, it would have some impact for a few years, but over the longer run, this would hardly move the needle. Publicly funded investment in research and development is the only “approach that could potentially return us to the days when technology-led growth lifted all boats. However, we should be careful. Private failure is not enough to justify government intervention. Just because the private sector is underinvesting does not necessarily imply that the government will make the right investments.”

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Book:Jump-Starting America: How Breakthrough Science Can Revive Economic Growth and the American Dream
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“In the venture capital context, long-tail investing denotes a systematic approach to the deployment of risk capital into entrepreneurial ventures by intermediaries who attempt to use their domain expertise to generate large returns. In a world of perfect information and efficient markets, economic theory suggests, intermediaries should be absent. The fact that venture capitalists do exist is arguably because they are able to maintain informational advantages in the selection and governance of startup investments. Another interpretation is that they function merely as capital conduits and organizers, but do not particularly add value in terms of startup outcomes.”

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Book:VC: An American History
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“Long-tail returns have always been difficult to generate, and the VC industry has sometimes been chaotic and subject to the destructive ebbs and flows of investment cycles. History shows, however, that the social benefits of venture capital have been immense. By facilitating the financing of radical new technologies, US venture capitalists have supported a large range of high-tech firms whose products, from semiconductors to recombinant insulin, telecommunications inventions, and search engines, have revolutionized the way we work, love, and produce. While technological change can often disrupt labor markets and increase wage inequality, in the long run, innovation is essential to productivity gains and economic growth. The venture capital industry has been a powerful driver of innovation, helping to sustain economic development and US competitiveness.”

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Book:VC: An American History
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