Quote

VC firms are... responsible for the full life cycle of a company: they find it, help it grow, open up a Rolodex, and sell it.

If your business had no risk, you could go get a bank loan and call it a day. VCs like risks - without them, venture capital wouldn't exist. But they need to be risks that VCs are good at assessing and managing.

We worked personally with a lot of great VCs. They just work incredibly hard at supporting entrepreneurs and their companies.

Many entrepreneurs, and the venture investors who back them, seek to build billion-dollar companies.

Understand that VCs are simply a sophisticated form of financial investors who, in turn, need to satisfy their own investors.

The San Francisco Bay Area has more VC firms and dollars invested than all East Coast cities combined.

Venture capital today is clustered in just a few locations - Silicon Valley, New York, Boston, and D.C. It's far from efficiently distributed and accessible.

For a first-time entrepreneur, there's nothing better than being in Silicon Valley because there is so much going on, and there's such a large number of inventors, that even a B level idea or a C level idea could be nurtured and be given venture capital there.

If I were to leave and raise a venture fund, I would have to find 10 or 100 LPs. They would all give me a bunch of money, and I would take a percentage of that to pay myself. They would expect me to invest that over the next three years, and they want that money back in seven or eight years.

I'll say this: I can't think of one instance in my 20 years in venture capital in which I have wanted to sell a company before the entrepreneur.