Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
If you don't have a VP Finance on your team reporting to you, do yourself, your team, and your investors a favor and go hire one right now.
While I'm a venture capitalist who invests in early-stage tech companies, I often feel like a professional emailer and conference call maker.
We should explore ways to make us a more amazing species. A more fascinating society. We should embrace our innovations and evolve with them.
I especially love right-now sci-fi: stuff that happens in current time but incorporates a scientific breakthrough that is currently being explored.
I'm a huge believer in the importance of vacations for leaders, entrepreneurs, and everyone else. I work extremely hard - usually 70+ hours a week.
I'm always fascinated by the dedicated monitors in a hospital. Non-standard cables, funny button shapes, odd LED colors, and lots of extra controls.
Computer science needs to be part of the core curriculum - like algebra, biology, physics, or chemistry. We need all schools to teach it, not just 10%.
I separate the world of startup communities into two constituencies - leaders and feeders. The leaders are entrepreneurs and the feeders everyone else.
I can't tell you the number of people who pitched something and have no idea whom they are pitching it to. They don't know the background of the investor.
Taking a great new idea with an entrepreneurial team that wants to create something significant and trying to build a real company is what is interesting.
Silicon Valley has been developing as a startup community for over 60-70 years. This notion that you can create something in two or five years is foolish.
I'm a venture capitalist. I like to say my job is to help and support entrepreneurs. I can play a leadership role, but my organization can't be the leader.
While I've had plenty of ups and downs, dealt with my share of failure, and struggled through emotionally difficult periods, I'm fundamentally an optimist.
I'm an optimistic person, and I tend to bury my cynicism in what I read and the movies I watch. My optimism holds that the good guys eventually come out on top.
Building a startup community is not a zero-sum game in which there are winners and losers: if everyone engages, they and the entire community can all be winners.
From pitch perspective, the more you wear your idea, the more it fits you and your comfortable with it, the easier it is for somebody like me to say tell me more.
As a teenager, my dad taught me about the idea of unintended consequences, and I've had the experience, and how to deal with it, pounded into my soul over the years.
While the line between stress, deep anxiety, and depression often blurs, most entrepreneurs struggle with broad mental health issues at various points in their lives.
When I think about the books I've written, it probably takes 150,000-200,000 words to get a 50,000 page book. Highlighting something and hitting Cmd-X is second nature.
In the mid-to-late 1990s, I was an entrepreneur-in-residence at the Kauffman Foundation working with Jana Matthews on 'learning programs for high growth entrepreneurs.'
I watched my parents act as completely equal partners in their relationship, and as a son to a woman I respect immensely, I never thought of gender inequality as a child.
I have shifted my mindset in terms of how companies should... focus on building amazing products. If you have amazing products, the marketing of those products is trivial.
As I continue to believe that innovation and entrepreneurship are the key drivers to our economic future, it's frustrating to hear such little cogent discussion around it.
I love near-term sci-fi. I especially love right-now sci-fi: stuff that happens in current time but incorporates a scientific breakthrough that is currently being explored.
When I struggled with a depressive episode in 2013, I realized that I had a glitch in my thinking about my own motivation. I had separated learning and teaching into different concepts.
I wonder if, as the tech to deliver content continues to evolve, we will start seeing the one season / 6-8 hour show that ends at a peak moment rather than is cancelled because it sucks.
My wife is a writer. She grew up in Alaska. She told me she was moving to Boulder and that I could come with her if I wanted to. We were married at the time, so I chose to come with her.
St. Louis is a good example of a vibrant city. Having stayed in a hotel in 2011 overlooking Cardinals stadium when they won the World Series, their fans definitely show up loud and proud.
Over the years, I've been involved in many business crises. I qualify this, since my crises have never involved life and death or the survival of the human race. But they are still crises.
I'm very comfortable in the U.S. and Europe, but I feel completely out of place in the rest of the world, mostly because I never spent time outside the U.S. and Europe until I was in my 30s.
If you sell a physical product, you have a lot of Q4 upside and unpredictability, but now you have to manage your cash to get to Q4 so that you can invest in building inventory to over-perform.
I regularly see leaders change what they say because they get bored of saying the same thing over and over again. It's not that they vary a few words or change examples, but they change the message.
Q1 is the easiest quarter to make. If you miss your Q1, regardless of the type of revenue you have, you aren't going to make your revenue plan for the year because your budget process isn't accurate.
The first thing that any city that's trying to create a startup community or an entrepreneurial ecosystem that's vibrant should do is get rid of the idea that they're trying to be like Silicon Valley.
When I was in my mid-20s, running a successful company and clinically depressed, I was afraid to talk to anyone other than my psychiatrist about it. I was ashamed that I was even seeing a psychiatrist.
Ever since I learned about the concept of garbage collection in 6.001 at MIT in 1984 while using Scheme on HP Chipmunks, I've always thought of dreaming as the same as garbage collection for a computer.
I would say my whole universe is probably categorized as guerilla marketing. For a long time, I had a line which was, 'Whenever I hear the word 'marketing,' it makes me throw up a little bit in my mouth.'
The quest for stability or homeostasis is silly. We should accept that we live on an incredibly dynamic planet in a rapidly changing environment, and do our best to have the most amazing experiences we can.
In 2013, when Google announced that Kansas City would be the first city in the country to have Google Fiber, I bought a house in the first neighborhood that was being wired up with Google's gigabit Internet.
Ultimately, the goal is to use acquisitions to compress time on product development and get people on the team, especially in senior roles, who can help build out areas of the company they have experience in.
If the crisis lasts moments, rapid action is critical. But if it's simply the beginning of a broader issue, especially one where the root cause isn't known yet, the worst thing a leader can do is act immediately.
There are two great fictional TV series about technology and the computer industry that each have now had three seasons. The one everyone knows about is 'Silicon Valley.' The lesser-known one is 'Halt and Catch Fire.'
While we should certainly be investing in our own STEM education, we should take advantage of the thousands of international students who come here to study and are ready to fill these gaps immediately upon graduation.
The super awesomeness would be a portable teleportation machine that I could take with me. I go wherever I want, and then I can go from there to wherever I want. Instantly. Without having to go through TSA. One can wish.
I've been using email since 1983. I started with MH and Rmail, then cc:Mail, then Microsoft Mail, with Compuserve mixed in. Eventually, I ended up using Pine for non-Windows stuff and Outlook for Windows stuff. For a while.
For those trying to protect the past, it is a way of retaining power, status, money, a way a life, predictability, comfort, control, and a bunch of other things like that. It is a struggle against the inevitability of change.
Governments spend all their time trying to get big companies to relocate their headquarters, and they end up subsidizing the move with tax breaks. And companies that relocate their headquarters are often not meaningful job creators.
So many companies talk about increasing the number of prospects at the top of the funnel, but they spend remarkably little time making sure actions are taken - on a daily basis - to make sure these prospects convert into paid users.
The pitch should be very clear about what you are doing, why you are doing it, and why I should care. If you can cover those things quickly and precisely, it's easy for me to decide whether I want to spend more time with you or not.
If I have a golden touch, I'd also say that I have the opposite of whatever a golden touch is, because I've had a lot of things fail. I think part of the experience of being successful is that you have to have a lot of stuff not work.