Alan Patricof Quotes

At Sequoia, we have opened offices in China and India, and we have made a handful of investments in Latin America/Brazil.

You must take risks, both with your own money or with borrowed money. Risk taking is essential to business growth.

The reality is institutions that invest in high growth have offices globally and talk across offices.

It's a tough problem that a company faces once they branch out beyond one set of offices in California into that big bad world out there.

When you've got a great business going, you go open another and take the risk of losing the whole thing. It's fun!

Votorantim is attentive to opportunities that arise in both domestic and international markets to expand its businesses.

I was honored to start a small business and to borrow an enormous amount of money and to build piece upon piece, place upon place, building upon building and product upon product, throughout the United States and eventually Europe and facilities around the world.

There is a reason companies raise money from investors, which is to invest in growth.

We don't actually plan to launch new businesses over the next few years, but we are planning to take the ones we have into new territories.

They will therefore not be in a hurry to risk their entire business by expanding too rapidly, but they are the major indicator of whether the manufacturing industry accepts there is a sustainable business in RFID production.

It doesn't take Warren Buffett to realize that when companies don't know what new rules will look like, it affects their ability to commit capital and create new jobs.

Many businesses fail because the owner wasn't willing to invest and wasn't educated on the difference between spending money frivolously and investing money into the business for growth, and the risks and rewards of that cash infusion.

I'd been a great angel investor, but professional venture capital was clearly not the right thing for me.

Hedge funds, private equity and venture capital funds have played an important role in providing liquidity to our financial system and improving the efficiency of capital markets. But as their role has grown, so have the risks they pose.

As an entrepreneur, in many ways it's like looking into the crystal ball for what my company will hopefully go through as it starts to think about bigger challenges - scaling internationally, getting ready to go public, and all those different things.

I've been spending quite a bit of time in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the U.K. as Mint is expanding globally, and I'm personally doing much of the research and business deals to make them happen.

Start small; get to know the landscape. We take risks but not major risks. We always started with small capital - €4m in Holland, $10m in Russia - and as we get to know the landscape of a country, we think about other businesses.

Axilor Ventures helps startups to improve their odds of success, and I look forward to supporting the executive management of Axilor with this vision.

The Godrej group is expanding rapidly. However, we are not diversifying much.

We had this unbelievable faith that no business has done, quite frankly, and we tripped along the way doing it, but within two years, we were in 40-plus countries. So we ran at an amazing pace, and this is where venture capitalists play a role. Making Groupon into what it is today, we had no role in it; the entrepreneurs did it.

Finance is critical. If sufficient investment is made in infrastructure and venture capital is made available, there will be a big improvement in the situation.

We have to still develop the Ikea group. We need many billions of Swiss francs to take on China or Russia.

I like the challenge of growing small companies into big global companies.

In terms of development of the company, the vast majority of our sales are in the Far East and we will expect to strengthen our activities there, perhaps even moving some of our engineering activities abroad.

For small businesses trying to figure out how to get big, I would say you are going to have to take some risks. And I think that is what shuts off most people. They are not willing take the risk.