FOUNDERS

The best founders are the ones who see the world differently and refuse to accept no for an answer.

Bet on the founder, not the idea. Ideas change. Great founders adapt.

The best founders I back have a personal connection to the problem they're solving. They built the thing because they wanted it and couldn't find it anywhere.

The best founders are relentlessly resourceful. They find a way when there is no obvious way.

The best founders share one characteristic: they are completely unreasonable about what they think they can accomplish.

The companies that have succeeded most spectacularly were those built by people who had an immense amount of self-belief at a time when others felt the odds were impossibly long.

The best founders are missionaries, not mercenaries. Missionaries are obsessed with the problem. Mercenaries are obsessed with the exit. You can tell the difference in about ten minutes.

The best founders are slightly unreasonable. They believe things are possible that the consensus says aren't. That unreasonableness is a feature, not a bug.

Great founders are missionaries, not mercenaries. Missionaries are building something they believe in. Mercenaries are just trying to make money.

If you want to build a great company, you have to be irrationally committed. People with backup plans execute their backup plans.

The best founders are slightly obsessive about the problem they're solving in a way that makes normal people uncomfortable. That's the signal.

The best founders I've met have a clarity of vision that borders on delusion, and the execution ability to make everyone else see what they see. That combination is extraordinarily rare.

I invested 12.7 million in Facebook when it was a college social network. The first 30 minutes with Mark told me everything I needed to know.

The best founders have a quality you cannot teach. They bend reality. Mark had it. Jensen has it. You know it in the first meeting.

Venture capital is about people not business plans. The best founders rewrite their business plan three times. The worst ones follow it blindly.

My brother and I built this company because we're gamers who believe digital ownership matters.

Founders shouldn't have to give away equity to fund growth when they already have predictable revenue.

I don't look for the best pitch. I look for the most determined person in the room.

After 15 years at Tiger, I wanted to invest my own way. Smaller fund, fewer positions, deeper relationships with founders.

My job as a board member is to be useful, not to be in charge. Founders build companies. I help.

The best companies are built by engineers who hate the tools they’re forced to use and decide to build something better.

I don’t need a big fund or a big team. I need good judgment and founders who trust me to be their first believer.

The best founders I’ve worked with don’t need to be told what to do. They need someone who’s been through it to tell them they’re not crazy.

The best founders are the ones who’ve been told no a thousand times and kept going. I know what that feels like.

Design isn’t decoration. It’s how it works. The best founders understand this. The rest add a nice font and call it design.

The best SaaS founders are obsessed with one customer problem. The worst are obsessed with their competitor’s features.

I have never invested in a business plan. I invest in people who will throw away the plan and build something better.

The best founders I have backed all had one thing in common. They were obsessed with their customers, not their competitors.

Every great startup has a secret. Something the founder understands that nobody else does yet.

After Skype, we wanted to build something that operated in the physical world, not just the digital one.

When I invested in Twitter, I wasn't betting on a product. I was betting on Jack. That is what early-stage angel investing actually is.

The best founders I know are obsessive. Not ambitious — obsessive. There is a real difference.

We are in the business of backing founders who are missionaries, not mercenaries.

I need to see founders thinking big, thinking 10X, thinking about moonshot ideas and goals.

You can test your idea with very little capital. Bootstrap first. Validate your model. Don't dilute before you're ready.

The three aspects of building a private equity firm are knowing the entrepreneur, operating with the spirit of trust through partnership, and nurturing the dream.

I had the privilege of working with more than 100 entrepreneurs very closely, and that's when I realised that intrinsically I am an entrepreneur.

If that capital comes with deep understanding and sensitivity towards the human being behind the business and the dream they are pursuing, that is much better.

You have to empathise with people who are doing a deal after 32 years of starting a company. It is an emotional decision for the founders of Patni.

I have a lot of love and respect for founders of companies because they go through the worst of it.

We like sitting with the founder till the IPO baton has passed. That's our DNA.

I feel this IPO price optimisation is a silly exercise and I keep telling founders, what's your gain in this? You're the one holding the bag.

There are two kinds of founders we back: those solving large, uniquely Indian problems by tapping into the country's dense network of micro-entrepreneurship, and those building global products with the ambition to compete beyond India.

We want Blume to be one of the first ports of call where they come to share their ideas, dreams and passion.

India's time is here. Today's new tech role models are the founders of Flipkart, Inmobi, Snapdeal, Mu Sigma and many others.

In most cases one can almost always convince oneself that the market's not large enough and we've made that mistake a couple of times.

I love working with founders that are looking for a partner, not just capital. Capital is a commodity.

Storytelling is one of the most underrated characteristics of a strong founder.

The ability to listen, because the market is always telling you something, the competitors are telling you something.

That individual, when they are presenting to me, should get me as excited about the problem as they are.

You need to build a team around you.

Good entrepreneurs just want to build something big.

The business plan he presents in the beginning is always different from what the business finally evolves into.

The entrepreneur has to have the ability to listen to what the market is saying, adapt and make changes.

I always try to understand what drives founders to devote their life to a problem.

I think amazing success can be achieved by highly imperfect people.

I am drawn to founders who hold themselves to a high bar, stay connected to reality, and build with purpose.

The best founders are authentic, self-aware, and honest about what they need to grow.

We don't own a piece of the founder.

We don't think of ourselves as wanting to just become a founder's best friend.

We have a lot of empathy for the founders. But, we have a fiduciary responsibility to our clients as much as we do to our founders.

We are in the business of backing outliers.

There are a lot of opportunities for founders who have the capability to imagine and envision what products India and the world need. There is limitless headroom for entrepreneurs.

We do not invest in business plans. We invest in people.

I look for entrepreneurs with a big dream and the stubbornness to chase it for ten years.

Our job does not end when the check clears. That is when the real work with a founder starts.

In the earliest days, you are betting on the founder more than the business plan.

The reality is no, you did not do that, the CEO did that or the team did that.

I do not invest in projects, I invest in people. The person is always more important than the business plan.

Back the founder first. A great person in a rough market beats a weak person in a great one.

Small town youth are the most energetic and creative group of people in this era.

We can't give you success. What VCs can do is increase the speed and the scale of that success.

I think, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates were dropped out from Harvard, and now there is a guy who wants to drop out from Harvard in front of me. That's why I said 'I've got no idea what you're doing, it seems you're doing a great thing, and they said they want to focus on travel'.

Most founders who pitch to me, I don't allow them to open their laptops. You have to know everything in your head. If you're good at cooking, you don't need to peek at the recipe, right? Just cook it on the spot.

There are failures with integrity, and there are failures without integrity.

At that time, we realized that we shared the same vision, and the deal was closed after 3 meetings, in under 28 hours.

I wanted to plan what I want to create and build it with my own hands.

Silicon Valley rewired my brain. It taught me that young people with very little experience can still tackle incredibly large problems.

To be a good founder, you have to be disagreeable, but humility is also needed.

Founders have to make decisions with little to no data within a certain deadline, so they have to grab as much knowledge as they can and process it to figure out what decisions they need to make.

My insight is that entrepreneurs are 80 per cent trained and 20 per cent born with it.

We have to look at founders as human beings. They are not money-making machines, they are human.

Southeast Asian founders are more ambitious now because they have support from the ecosystem.

We really care about founder-market fit, not just product-market fit. We care about having founders who feel for what they're building.

I encourage founders to build good relationships with their life partners, their spouses, their parents, because overcoming challenges in any kind of relationship or interaction gives them new skills they can use at work.

You can teach financial discipline, but you can't teach attitude. Understanding why an entrepreneur is doing this is just as important as what they're doing.

The CEO is no longer you. No longer me. You are a supporter. Stop telling the CEO what to do.

If we have to be too hands-on, it means we screwed up on the investment, and we shouldn't have invested.

The mistake I have done is actually investing in a superstar founder, but not knowing who they can talk to.

For me, the thing I love most in this world is finding a great founder with a new idea and investing from the very beginning, often before a product or business plan even exists.

They have decided to bet their company, or even their career, in this space.

One of the big challenges in a bull market is trying to get at the true motivations of the founders.

It is more about following the trends of entrepreneurs than it is unilaterally trying to decide what is interesting. As an investor, your job is to shift your attention to find it.

But I think many of our best investments are when the founder is thinking much more advanced than ours.

We wanted to slow the pace down quite a bit relative to what was in vogue at the time.

When push comes to shove, most founders are not able to take those hard decisions.