Businessman

The point of an accelerator is to teach you about companies and business, not about technology.

The point of an accelerator is to teach you about companies and business, not about technology.

Being a public company is really terrible for most companies. I'd say Facebook and Google have done a pretty good job of standing up to the incredible quarterly pressure to hit numbers, but most companies - and I've observed a lot now - don't do a very good job of that.

I have plenty of investments that I wish I'd never made. But the model is to lose money on a lot of investments and then make 1,000X or 10,000X on an investment.

If a company is profitable, the founder is in control. If it's not, investors are in control.

Traditional local advertising is not what retailers want. They want not just for you to see an ad - they want you to come into the store, to be a repeat customer and to spread the word.

The hard part of running a business is that there are a hundred things that you could be doing, and only five of those actually matter, and only one of them matters more than all of the rest of them combined. So figuring out there is a critical path thing to focus on and ignoring everything else is really important.

Making money is often more fun than spending it, though I personally have never regretted money I've spent on friends, new experiences, saving time, travel, and causes I believe in.

One of the things we urge Y-Combinator companies to do is to have profitability in grasp. If you need to get profitable before your A round of money, you ought to be able to do that.

I don't often get involved with campaigns at all.

I think you can say a lot of evil behavior by companies is short-term optimization.

Don't hire for the sake of hiring. Hire because there is no other way to do what you want to do.

I think the mistake people make most often when they invest in other kinds of startups is they say, 'This is totally different.' And so the things that matter, like making a product that people desperately want, like talking to customers, they throw this out the window. That is a recipe for heartache and tears.

If you ask a founder how their company is doing, they always say, 'Oh it's great. We're totally crushing it,' and that's almost never true.

The way to build billion dollar companies is to first build something people love. There isn't really a shortcut there.

If you have a startup that's keeping it up at night because you think it's so great, then you should do that.

It's easy to say, 'I'm going to build something that already exists,' but it's difficult to clearly and succinctly describe something new.

I love working with really early stage startups where the outcome is still in doubt. Maybe they'll go on to greatness, or maybe they'll never get off the runway at all.

Move fast. Speed is one of your main advantages over large competitors.

I believe in the future, and to be a good investor, you have to believe in the future.