Jon Lovett Quotes

I wish I had invested in the series A of Snapchat and Uber.

Investors like to invest based on traction, so it's always better to raise money when you've got more traction than less.

I'm a very active angel investor in a number of different companies.

Startups are constantly raising money, sometimes before they have even hired a lawyer.

Nominally, I stated a company. Practically, it's a venture capital firm that allows me to be an investor in early stage companies.

Learn to raise capital by any means necessary. That's your primary job as an entrepreneur. You must continually raise capital from family and friends, banks, suppliers, customers and investors.

Kai-Fu's Innovation Works is the top very-early-stage fund in China. We are proud to be an investor, and hope that IW will help to produce in China companies on the scale of Facebook, Zynga, or Groupon.

Little startups are ridiculously overfunded.

We have to develop the whole system of early stage investors and a tax system around it. For every Google that has come on the scene, there are hundred entrepreneurs who never did.

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

With tech startups, it's all loose-goosie. You raise money as you go, often from friends, family and investors.

While seed deals have gotten easy, Series A negotiations still often feel like the death of 1,000 cuts.

Venture capital is a dynamic and people-driven business.

You, as an entrepreneur, must make sure the postmoney valuation is a number you can obtain. You don't want too high of a valuation.

I'm hard-pressed to think of companies that don't need venture capital that are going after big opportunities. I think, in almost all cases, if they're going after big opportunities, they are going to need to raise quite a bit of money.

We use convertible notes a lot at our fund - 8VC - so often that we just call them 'notes' to save time.

I think Wall Street is very important, especially to tech companies. Wall Street will get in their rhythm and go fund tech companies, and tech companies will go create jobs and employ a lot of people, so there's that aspect of Wall Street.

Beware angel investors: they can be disruptive.

We need to encourage investors to invest in high-technology startups.

I think for larger-scale entrepreneurship, it's true - for men and women - that people who already have capital tend to do better.

There is no country in the world where it's as easy to find venture capital in the stock market as the United States.

We own only a small percentage in Omnivore, but we manage it. It is basically a venture capital fund to help newer enterprises and provide them with the funding they require in their early stages of development.

Like most plutocrats, I, too, am a proud and unapologetic capitalist. I have founded, cofounded or funded over 30 companies across a range of industries. I was the first non-family investor in Amazon.com. I cofounded a company called aQuantive that we sold to Microsoft for 6.4 billion dollars. My friends and I, we own a bank.

When people start talking about venture capital and finances and how to create this and do that, a lot of it, I swear, it's like sitting in an escrow meeting when all you want to do is buy a house, and you're signing 50 pieces of paper, but you have no idea what they're talking about.

While I wouldn't say that most entrepreneurs find it easy to get funding, there are certainly more people out there funding technology and healthcare companies than in other areas.