Alfred Lin Quotes

I think one of the key differentiators I bring to the table as a venture capitalist is a solid understanding of the public markets and how they operate.

I delivered lectures, and I was also a consultant for international companies in finance, both private equity and big venture capital funds.

I wanted a CFO with public company experience; I needed an HR department, new office space, and a board which could help me grow the business. Insight, the private equity firm I chose, helped me with all that.

I meet young people all the time who say something like, 'I want to work in venture capital.' And I can see why. Who wouldn't want to be smart, well-paid, dispense large sums of money, and tell people what to do?

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.

Whatever the potential pitfalls, banks are increasingly enthusiastic about venture capital, particularly in new companies with strong prospects in fields like health care and technology.

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

I've probably done more venture capital deals and expansion financings than I have done private equity deals. But both are the same. Private equity companies have also built jobs.

There was a time when I was wondering about this business of going public, so I visited about a half-dozen companies in the Boston area, all of them formed by MIT faculty and all had gone public.

I've been a customer of the top venture capital firms, so I know exactly what they do and don't do.

As I became a venture capitalist, it's almost like I went to the dark side for a while.

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

Big banks have long had private equity divisions that put up capital for deals too complex or risky for individual shareholders to finance.

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

I'm a very practical, pragmatic capitalist. I was trained at Goldman Sachs. I went to Harvard Business School. I was as hard-nosed a capitalist as you get. I specialized in media, in investing in media companies, and it's a very, very tough environment.

While I'm a venture capitalist who invests in early-stage tech companies, I often feel like a professional emailer and conference call maker.

VC has always been this high-touch, in-your-face-type business.

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.

Professional services industries like finance, consulting, and legal services are, by definition, meta-industries. That is, they serve to help large companies raise money, buy and sell each other, reorganize, implement new systems, conduct complex transactions, and so forth.

I've had two IPOs: with Etsy in 2015 and Cloudera in 2016. There have also been a ton of trade sales in my portfolio.

The private equity world is a relatively small one. There are currently probably a few thousand professional jobs worldwide. In private equity, that's probably about all there is. So in the scheme of things, the firms are all relatively small.

I don't think a lot of people have been entrepreneurial about venture capital.

The mutual fund industry provided the money for Intel and Motorola and Hewlett-Packard to crush the competitors.

Going public is 18-month process, while an acquisition is a 6-month process. Going public means going under so much scrutiny, regulatory approval, auditing, magnified 10 times. Having the stomach to do that isn't necessarily in my DNA. My DNA is building a product and a service.

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