Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The best talent in the venture industry doesn't work in large companies and won't work in large companies.
If you want to create something great and do it faster than the competition, you need to be action oriented.
Demo: presentation of a specific set of capabilities needed to solve the customer's critical business issue.
Yahoo is free, it's fast and it's Web-centric. AOL is slow, it costs money and requires proprietary software.
Founders should think of their company as a product and build it and shape it with the same passion and care.
Over the past 10 years, the majority of value creation in the venture community has been in consumer Internet.
It's important to understand the compensation equation that a CEO and a founder has with his or her employees.
When you rest on your laurels is right when you have the risk. It exists for every company, no matter how big.
Crystal-clear thinking is one of the things we look for - not a fancy slide pitch, but crystal-clear thinking.
Well, there are more writers of blogs right now than there are readers, so that's clearly a vanity phenomenon.
People are looking to have more meaning in their lives. It is a sign the technology community is coming of age.
If we don't embrace a low carbon economy this decade, it won't just harm the planet, but also the U.S. economy.
We like companies that can get big and powerful on $50 million or less and not two, three, four or five billion.
Early in a startup, product decisions should be hunch driven. Later on, product decisions should be data driven.
It takes great salesmanship to convince a customer to buy something from you that isn't built or isn't finished.
The old economy was about people acquiring a single skill for life; the new economy is about life-long learning.
A tremendous chief executive in a small market will never be great. All great companies start with great markets.
I grew up in a small town in northeastern Indiana. I had an all-American childhood. And I grew up as an optimist.
You need to use data science and machine learning to get the ground truth of what's happening inside of a company.
All of the business of selling apps and selling subscriptions is extremely cruelly misunderstood, including by me.
Foursquare's adoption of a game dynamic when it launched is a particularly clever implementation of a social hook.
There's a number of companies clearly that we wish we had invested in either at the early or at the moderate stage.
Skyping with your spouse works well enough, but apparently it is hard to get the kids to hang out on Skype for long.
When I started in the business in 1999 and 2000, we had companies that were going public in two, three or four years.
We see China as a large market opportunity with similar cyclical economic cycles that occur throughout every economy.
Israel is the second Silicon Valley, and it is therefore the only other place we have chosen to expand our activities.
Building product is not about having a large team to manage. It is about having a small team with the right people on it.
All markets have boom and bust cycles, and I think venture capital market has even more exaggerated boom and bust cycles.
Board meetings should not be for the benefit of the board. They should be for the benefit of the CEO and the senior team.
I was more conservative when I was younger. But I don't think that I've moved left - I think the country has moved right.
At Sequoia, we have opened offices in China and India, and we have made a handful of investments in Latin America/Brazil.
The fact is that the amount of money startups raise in their seed and Series A rounds is inversely correlated with success
Not acknowledging that beauty is complex-that's the problem. I enjoy making it complex for people, because that's my world.
If you are in Mountain View, you don't resonate with the needs of urban dwellers. Tumblr couldn't have emerged in Sunnyvale.
Having an investor on your board of directors who is naive about public markets or finds them complex or scary is non-optimal.
Give me an entrepreneur with a lot of courage, gusto and who iterates rapidly, and I will back that person day in and day out.
The companies that do the best job on managing a user's privacy will be the companies that ultimately are the most successful.
Facebook could have gone public whenever it wanted. We decided the right time was 2012. It could have easily been 2010 or 2014.
For us, whether the market is skewed from a bubble perspective or not really is mitigated by staying focused on what we do best.
I want to make as much of a contribution as I can, to Harvard, to higher education and hopefully, to education around the world.
Green technologies - going green - is bigger than the Internet. It could be the biggest economic opportunity of the 21st century.
It is critical to bundle all future variable costs of supporting the customer in order to fairly estimate the future contribution.
If you're trying to get to profitability by lowering costs as a startup, then you are in a very precarious and difficult position.
Founded in August 2003, MySpace would go on to be the most-visited social networking site in the world from 2005 until early 2008.
The theory that if wages go up, employment goes down isn't a physical law like F=MA. It's a moral law, like 'Bedtime is 9:00 P.M.'
No matter how wealthy a few plutocrats get, we can never drive a great national economy. Only a thriving middle class can do that.
Blog-based businesses have lower cost structures and are more 'authentic,' and as a result are drawing larger shares of ad budgets.
We've tried to build Sequoia Capital with an eye for the long term that we really look for in the companies we like to partner with.
I was raised in a house where my mom was the primary breadwinner. It was a dysfunctional house, but she showed tremendous resilience.
I would staple a green card to the diploma of anyone that graduates with a degree in the physical sciences or engineering in the U.S.