There's a final exam in venture every four to six years. The scary thing is you need to get an 'A' in every discipline. You need to be on generational planning, need to be on great deal flow, need be on great outcomes, you need to be on great company building.
From David Sze
The most important thing for us is investing and making companies great, and then they have all the options they want, whether that's to go public or stay private.
I think that the most important thing we look for in partners is that they can help build companies and, you know, we have the - we have the opportunity to do that at different stages.
We listen to the entrepreneur. We try to have a fine tuning fork to understand what they are saying and whether that makes sense and know it when we see it. We don't try to do too much predicting.
For us, whether the market is skewed from a bubble perspective or not really is mitigated by staying focused on what we do best.
When I started in the business in 1999 and 2000, we had companies that were going public in two, three or four years.
I think that it will be the mobile technologies, both from the enterprise and the consumer side, where super unicorns will come from. I still believe that social networking in combination with mobile will create opportunities for super unicorns.
I think there are a lot of companies that are staying private longer. Much more of their growth is happening while they are on the private side. So their valuations are hitting $1 billion while they are still private more often.
A lot of great people come to Facebook. In our business, we're about how do we help connect our companies to great people across all levels.
The best opportunities are often ones where you're being contrarian. That doesn't mean being contrarian for contrarian's sake, but it means you're thoughtful about the risks of following the crowd.
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