Troy Carter Quotes

I wanted to be a venture capitalist and join Sequoia Capital. They've financed and helped built some really special and enormously successful companies, including Google, Yahoo, Paypal, YouTube, Cisco, Oracle, Apple, and also Zappos.

We actually tried to invest in Twitter in April 2007, right when it launched. At the time, the company was wary of having a classic, tier-one traditional venture firm involved.

There's a number of companies clearly that we wish we had invested in either at the early or at the moderate stage.

Little startups are ridiculously overfunded.

Early investors in Uber and Airbnb, though they remain private companies, have valued them at stratospheric multiples based largely on the notion that Uber will transform and dominate local transportation and Airbnb will revolutionize the hotel industry.

I think a lot of folks feel like Uber was a company they missed out on. Sequoia passed on us three times.

In 1986, Microsoft and Oracle went public within a day of each other, and I recall telling one of my colleagues that the software business will become big. So I started working with software companies in the mid-'80s and never turned back.

I've little in common with the scene in Silicon Valley and San Francisco. I'm a New Yorker.

I'm invested in about 13 private companies. I've advised probably another 50 private companies.

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.

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.

This is a bit like big-game hunting. You look for companies of a certain size that deserve to be public.

I don't understand why young entrepreneurs feel this pressure to take venture capital or go public. Don't get me wrong: Public companies are A-OK with me. I just think there is another way. Staying private is a lot more sane.

It's almost a cliche that great Silicon Valley entrepreneurs don't go sit on a beach when they make a lot of money; they get back to work building another company or at least investing in other people's companies.

I often talk about the PayPal mafia out of San Francisco, people that were in PayPal and got out of PayPal and continue to reinvest in other start-ups and create a huge pay-it-forward type of network there.

You see 6,000 times more tech companies in San Francisco than you see in Seattle. All the money is in San Francisco when you look at the venture fund maps. The PR is in San Francisco. The centricity of the industry is in San Francisco.

The amounts of money in Silicon Valley are staggering.

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

You don't necessarily have to go public to get to the next level.

Well private money can take risks in a way that government money often isn't willing to.

I don't program, so I don't belong in Silicon Valley. If I did belong in Silicon Valley, I'd be there creating a revolutionary compression algorithm for billions of dollars.

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

The myth of the peachfuzz billionaire has emerged. This new Horatio Alger typically launches his first start-up in middle school, and somewhere between the campus computer-science lab and a move to Palo Alto hacks up a Web site where users provide fun or useful content.

I've actually taken companies public, I've actually busted companies, I've actually gone broke.

SpaceX is very unusual. I don't know of any other startup where the founder put in $100 million of his own money before looking for any outside capital. They have wildly exceeded any reasonable expectations.