Alan Schaaf Quotes

To be a designer today is to be an entrepreneur. Whether you're a two-man operation in Shoreditch or a 3,000-person, vertically integrated brand, you need to have the wherewithal to run your business through investment, considering everything from start-up funds to your exit plan or what it takes to go public.

The problem with taking venture capital is if you take $5m from someone, it may feel great; you may feel like they're validating your business model. But they're giving $5m out to 20 different people, hoping one of them will be a hit. They don't really care if it's you.

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

So much of venture capital is pattern recognition.

If you want to build a startup that has a good chance of succeeding, don't listen to me. Listen to Paul Graham and others who are applying tons of data to the idea of startup success. That will maximize your chance of being successful.

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.

By definition startups usually do not turn a profit.

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

Technology ventures can succeed with very little investment, unlike many other industries. A lot of the big Internet players like Google or Yahoo were started by a couple of guys with computers. Microsoft was started in Bill Gates' garage.

The biggest challenge is to build the team and start the company, while hiring people, raising money, building a brand which has no history, all at the same time. You're doing a lot of things that in an established company are already done.

I don't know the venture fund terms. I don't know what a seed round is. I want nothing to do with it.

I really have become very interested at working with and helping entrepreneurs at the early stages of their growth.

I have seen a lot of now-great companies at their earliest stages, and these early-stage startups are not built by the senior people who know how to run and scale big-company machines.

Startups should be - if you graph their financial performance, it should be what's called a J curve. You start out at zero. you're not making any money; you're not losing any money.

In an increasingly competitive technology world, VCs must work more and more closely with portfolio companies to develop superior technology, talent, and operations.

The better I get at investing in and helping companies, the result is more founders who are excited to work with me and more of my wonderful limited partners insisting I take piles of their loot to keep it all going.

The most important question venture capitalists ask is what prevents your company from growing faster.

A board member of mine used to say sales fix everything in a startup, and that is really true.

Finding initial funds is the primary barrier most entrepreneurs face. Many people don't have three or six months' worth of savings to free themselves up to do months of unpaid legwork.

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

In the past, when venture-funded startups told their investors they'd found a profitable business model, the first thing VCs would do is to start looking for an 'operating exec' - usually an MBA who would act as the designated 'adult' and take over the transition from Search to Build.

What would I advise an aspiring young entrepreneur? Certainly I'd say read the works of great entrepreneurs and investors like Ben Horowitz, Peter Thiel, and many others. But what's more important is to get real experience at a great startup.

What's the word to describe the thing that all of us are trying to do, which is to found or work for or invest in a company that is the winner of all winners?

I'm in favour of entrepreneurial, risk-taking businesses that create great products and services.

You will always need more capital than you think, because it will always take you longer to reach profitability than you can imagine.