“We need to start to talk about money in ways that dethrone it and make it subject to human ethics and standards of love and decency.”
Source: The Clean Money Revolution: Reinventing Power, Purpose, and Capitalism
“Each year about 600,000 start-ups are launched. Less than 0.5 percent attract VC. Of Inc. magazine's annual list of the 500 fastest growing companies in the United States assessed over a decade (1997–2007), less than 20 percent of companies were venture backed”
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“62.4 percent of VC investments were completely lost while 3.1 percent of the investments accounted for 53 percent of the profits for roughly 600 investments”
Source: The Business of Venture Capital: Insights from Leading Practitioners on the Art of Raising a Fund, Deal Structuring, Value Creation, and Exit Strategies
“Don't strive to understand
When there is no meaning.
Leave yourself
Happy and blind
In the unborn light...
Some day, when silence is complete
We'll be hiding in the eye of time
Behind the memory,
Then we start all over.”
Source: The Void That Reflects Your Beauty
“It is best to be the CEO; it is satisfactory to be an early employee, maybe the fifth or sixth or perhaps the tenth. Alternately, one may become an engineer devising precious algorithms in the cloisters of Google and its like. Otherwise, one becomes a mere employee. A coder of websites at Facebook is no one in particular. A manager at Microsoft is no one. A person (think woman) working in customer relations is a particular type of no one, banished to the bottom, as always, for having spoken directly to a non-technical human being. All these and others are ways for strivers to fall by the wayside — as the startup culture sees it — while their betters race ahead of them. Those left behind may see themselves as ordinary, even failures.”
Source: Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology
“While we might expect to see venture capital develop further in an increasingly intangible economy, it is not clear that governments can or should do much more to promote it than they already do. As Josh Lerner showed in The Boulevard of Broken Dreams (2012), once tax breaks or subsidies for venture capital get beyond a certain level, they tend to encourage dumb investments (since the tax gain on its own is enough for the investors to profit); since the entire point of venture capital is smart investment, very large tax breaks are self-defeating. For a country to grow its venture capital sector, time and favorable framework conditions are more important than additional subsidies.”
Source: Capitalism without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy
“Private equity enables the growth and development of unlisted businesses.”
“Private equity is a growing form of financing.”
“It's not that Twitter isn't successful, it just isn't successful enough to justify all the money investors have pumped into it.”
Source: Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity
“If you're not constantly testing, you're going to be tested constantly.”
“Amidst all the hype and hoopla around this business, I wanted to emphasize the challenge—it is seductive but the failure rate is very high. And those who fail have no good place to go.”
Source: The Business of Venture Capital: Insights from Leading Practitioners on the Art of Raising a Fund, Deal Structuring, Value Creation, and Exit Strategies