Ever hear about “the power behind the throne”. The power behind tech start-ups is not electricity, instead it is brain-power – and he got lots. “Well, what has he ever done?” you say? Let’s see, Zynga, FourSquare, Etsy, Twitter, and more …
“I learned a really valuable lesson. In 1999 we sold GeoCities to Yahoo. I had all this high-priced Yahoo stock … and my wife said, “Let’s buy a townhouse in New York City”. So we sold enough Yahoo stock to buy the townhouse in New York City, and renovate it, and a year later that was our entire net worth. Because everything else had gone to zero. And so, I learned a lesson, which was, you take high priced internet stock and you trade it for New York real estate.”
“I do think the one benefit of never having had an operating job in my career is that I have a lot of respect for the job that the CEO is doing and I don’t personally feel that I could do it better.”
“(the dot-com bubble of 1999) … was an incredible learning experience for me. I spent a lot of time thinking about the mistakes we made and what worked and what didn’t work. What kinds of companies worked and what kinds of companies didn’t work. What kind of investment strategies worked and when they didn’t work and I feel I came out of it much, much stronger …”
“The internet is a two-way medium. And if you look at most of the investments that worked, that we made in the 90’s, they were businesses that actually took advantage of the architecture of the internet.”
“And the things that didn’t work were the things that people were just taking an offline business and porting it to the internet without taking any native advantage of the internet.”
“Another thing we learned was, uh, lean. You know, spend very little money in the seed round and the Series A round. Get a long way before you really step on the gas, that money doesn’t buy success in the startup world.”
“I really feel that we are in the service business. The entrepreneur is the customer. The people who give us money are the shareholders and we are in the business of trying to make entrepreneurs successful. We’re not in the business of making money. Making money is the by-product of making entrepreneurs successful.”
“Entrepreneurs are really difficult customers to serve well. It takes a significant investment of time, energy, money, and intellect to satisfy them. But if you do it well, you will develop a reputation for great customer service that will keep the best ones lined up at your door.”
“I think that you want somebody who is a real product person. Somebody very adapt at the product, you don’t have to be technical. You can sit down with a bunch of engineers and some designers … that’s critical, that’s what I think entrepreneurs should be.”
“The other thing is, almost, you know, an ‘evangelical’ kind of personality, because when you start a company, you have nothing.”
“You gotta get people to join your company. And people to use your product. You gotta get people to invest in your company. Then, get people to write about your company. It’s the kind of leadership that people will follow you even though you don’t really have anything yet.”
“There does come a time when the company is not succeeding or the management team is revolting. And there are certain moments of crisis when the board has to act, and they have to make a change. But it shouldn’t be because the investor is uncomfortable with the entrepreneur, it has to be that there’s some larger problem.”
“I’ve been interested in community solar for a while now. It makes sense to me that a group of people can build and participate in a solar installation … where it most makes sense and then share in the energy that installation generates.”
“We believe that Bitcoin represents something fundamental and powerful. An open and distributed Internet peer to peer protocol for transferring purchasing power. It reminds us of SMTP, HTTP, RSS, and BitTorrent in its architecture and openness.”
“Digital Asset Mining is shorthand for “proof of work consensus validation of public blockchain infrastructure”. Thankfully we have the shorthand.”