Businessman

The more entrepreneurs in the world that are getting their ideas financed, the more great companies there are going to be that we can all invest in.

The most common way customer financing is done is you sell the customer on the product before you've built it or before you've finished it. The customer puts up the money to build the product or finish the product and becomes your first customer. Usually the customer simply wants the product and nothing more.

When my dad was in Vietnam, we lost a parent for a year. Thank God we didn't lose a parent for good.

Being an entrepreneur is hard. Having supportive and caring investors helps.

We need new medical approaches to preventing and/or curing disease. We need new scientific approaches to generating, storing, and being more efficient with energy. Maybe we need more space exploration. Maybe we need more undersea exploration.

Given New York City's cultural diversity, it has always attracted creative people.

Startups are rapidly changing systems. If you use an annual review cycle, you aren't getting feedback at the same pace that you need to adapt and change the business.

Venture capital is about capturing the value between the startup phase and the public company phase.

Building product is not about having a large team to manage. It is about having a small team with the right people on it.

The Internet is a computing platform built on top of core technology. Applied technology is what gets built on top of that: It's Web services.

Customers are a great way to finance a business for many reasons. First, customer financing is typically non dilutive. They want something from you other than equity in your business. Customers also help you fit your product to the market. And customers will help debug and improve the quality of the product.

Skyping with your spouse works well enough, but apparently it is hard to get the kids to hang out on Skype for long.

Venture capitalists are professional money managers. We are provided capital to invest as long as we can return it to our investors with a strong return in a reasonable amount of time. A strong return is three times cash on cash. A reasonable amount of time is ten years max.

When I see people laughing at ideas and companies we have backed, I smile. It means we are going to make a lot of money on that investment.

Games are the most social of all things on the web.

It takes great salesmanship to convince a customer to buy something from you that isn't built or isn't finished.

Not only do you have to put yourself in harms way in service of your country, you have to leave your families at home. It is a great sacrifice.

If you are successful, you will be cloned. That's life. In fact, it's a sign that you've made it when clones of your website, mobile app, and business start cropping up.

Board meetings should not be for the benefit of the board. They should be for the benefit of the CEO and the senior team.

It's upsetting to me that you have to be a millionaire to invest in your friend's start-up.