The most contrarian thing you can do in venture is invest in something that sounds crazy. If it sounds reasonable, someone else already did it.
There is no such thing as a bad market if you have a great founder. There is such a thing as a great market that kills bad founders faster.
Speed matters in private markets. Founders have options. If you can make a decision quickly and be a low-friction partner, that's a genuine competitive advantage.
Venture capital should be about funding things that can't get funded any other way. The moment you only fund safe things, you've stopped doing venture capital.
Your reputation is your deal flow. And your deal flow is everything. There's no shortcut to that.
We are not trying to be smarter than the founders. We are trying to identify who the great founders are and then support them.
Most VCs think their job is to pick the right horses. The best ones help build the horse.
I invested $500,000 in Uber. Everyone said an actor has no business doing venture capital. That check is worth more than my entire acting career.
I get taken more seriously as an investor now. But in the early days, founders would pitch me and think it was a joke. Those founders missed out.
Being famous gives you access to founders that most VCs dream about. I use that access to actually learn, not just to get deal flow.
I have invested in over 100 companies. Most of them failed. The ones that worked paid for everything plus a lifetime of lessons.
I have won 23 Grand Slams. Building a venture portfolio is harder. At least in tennis, I controlled the outcome.
I invest globally because the next Facebook will not necessarily come from Palo Alto. It might come from Beijing or Bangalore.
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.
Venture capital is about people not business plans. The best founders rewrite their business plan three times. The worst ones follow it blindly.
When Yahoo offered to buy Facebook for a billion dollars I helped convince Mark to say no. That was a two hundred billion dollar no.
Sequoia invested. Accel invested. The best VCs in the world backed us. Smart money is not always right.
Tiger Global. General Catalyst. Vista Equity. The best investors backed us. Even smart money gets AI hype wrong.
Tiger Global and Sequoia invested in us. Then ChatGPT launched. The best VCs in the world could not predict OpenAI's roadmap.
The best venture investments are the ones that everybody else thinks are terrible ideas.
Founders Fund invests in companies building the future, not in companies copying the present.
A $25 billion fund is a responsibility, not a trophy. Every dollar has to create value for founders and for society.
Kleiner Perkins needed to get back to what made it great — backing category-defining enterprise software. That's what I came to do.
Small funds force discipline. You can’t hide bad bets behind 50 portfolio companies when you only have 15.
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.
Being a woman managing partner at a top VC firm in 2022 shouldn’t be news. The fact that it is tells you everything about the industry.
New York VCs see the world differently than San Francisco VCs. We’re closer to finance, media, and the rest of the economy. That matters.
I built two companies before I became a venture capitalist. That is why founders trust me. I have been where they are.
Seed investing is about buying lottery tickets where you have read the research and know the odds are better than everyone thinks.
Patience in venture capital is not passive. It is an active choice to let compounding do its work.
Taking VC money is like taking a drug. It creates urgency that does not need to exist.
Capital is the least scarce resource in venture today. What founders actually need is access to the right people at the right moment.
A warm introduction from a founder the team respects is worth more than any cold email with a polished deck.
The best venture investments happen before there is any consensus. By the time everyone agrees a company is interesting, it is too late.
Being at Benchmark taught me what truly great pattern recognition looks like. The firms that win consistently are not smarter — they see more, faster.
Europe does not lack talent. It lacks access to the kind of capital and global networks that help companies reach their full potential.
India will produce the next generation of global technology leaders. I've bet my post-Cisco career on that.
We are in the business of backing founders who are missionaries, not mercenaries.
Fifteen years is what you should consider the active VC build-out in India. For the first five to seven years, we were kind of faking it till we make it.
Japans late-stage startups were starved of growth capital, and closing that gap is the whole reason Minerva exists.
We say no quickly, and we know we will get things wrong.
A good partner prevents the other from making a bad investment.
The reality is no, you did not do that, the CEO did that or the team did that.
The best returns come from getting in early, when a company is just a founder and a conviction.
There are only two big tables for venture capital in the world, China and the United States.
We do not just write a check. We hand a startup the door into Japan.
There's no Y Combinator of Japan, there's no Andreessen Horowitz of Japan, no Founders Fund of Japan.
We've always looked at venture capital as a product, and that's why we've built our own tools.
We can't give you success. What VCs can do is increase the speed and the scale of that success.
If every deal worked, you wouldn't be in venture capital. You'd be in luck.
We are patient, our funds are designed to be 10-year-plus funds.
We have had conversations every 12-24 months to re-brand ourselves to something which represents us, instead of attaching us to our legacy.