“ I never ever say that a specific provision is ‘standard’. Nothing is standard. You either need it or you don’t. Explain why you need it and most of the time you’ll get it or something like it as long as both sides really want to make a deal. ”
Fred Wilson
“ If you’re in a business with network effects, you probably want to get big fast, and that means you want to get outside investment… and you also want to take a lot of risks. ”
Joel Spolsky
“ The great venture capitalists recognize that their existence is dependent on entrepreneurs. ”
Brad Feld
“ You want to set the DNA for the company being scrappy. ”
Graham Hill
“ The company should not have survived. Really, we were dead. We were financially insolvent on paper for two years. ”
Tim Westergren of Pandora
“ Deals fall through. One of the most useful skills we learned from Viaweb was not getting our hopes up. We probably had 20 deals of various types fall through. After the first 10 or so we learned to treat deals as background processes that we should ignore till they terminated. ”
Paul Graham
“ It is in the best of interest of all venture capitalists to say that they are doing new deals even when they are not. ”
Stuart Ellman
“ The venture capital model is broken at worst, and dysfunctional at best. ”
Dan Primack
“ Bad VCs bug entrepreneurs about stupid shit that just really doesn’t matter. ”
Fred Wilson
“ We (VCs) are like the entrepreneur’s older brother — we help them, support them, but we kick their ass when needed. ”
Jeff Clavier
