George Packer Quotes

It's worth noting that everything - from the Internet to electric cars, genomic sequencing, mobile apps, and social media - were pioneered by startups, not existing companies.

Atari showed that young people could start big companies. Without that example it would have been harder for Jobs and Bill Gates, and people who came after them, to do what they did.

Before I started Code for America, I spent my career around startups. First it was game developers, small teams trying to make hits in a tough business. Then, when I started working on the Web 2.0 events, it was web startups during times of enormous opportunity and investment.

In the startup world, 'not working' is normal.

It's shocking we don't see more engineers and entrepreneurs interested in enterprise.

New startups embody the creativity, the innovation of young people, and for me, it was and is a very worthwhile experience to interact with them.

I'd like to see the word 'entrepreneur' knocked off its pedestal. Being 'entrepreneurial' is something I look for not only in founders to invest in, but also employees to hire.

There are a lot more companies with a lot younger people. It is just like 23-year-olds are starting companies, and they are scaling really quickly.

I played with different words like 'home run,' 'megahit,' and they just all sounded kind of 'blah.' So I put in 'unicorn' because they are - these are very rare companies in the sense that there are thousands of startups in tech every year, and only a handful will wind up becoming a unicorn company. They're really rare.

Silicon Valley's long-running track record of creating globally disruptive startups is the envy of the world.

Once you're an entrepreneur you're always an entrepreneur, and you need that fix.

Startups were thriving in Los Angeles when Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard were closer to the nursery than they were the garage.

Over the last ten years, technological advances have dramatically lowered the financial bar for starting a new company, but the courage bar for building a great company remains as high as it has ever been.

Your writers write these pieces about meaningless startups, meaningless apps and meaningless companies.

I'm a Silicon Valley guy. I just think people from Silicon Valley can do anything.

America demands invention and innovation to succeed.

For a lot of people, one of the reasons they don't like to work for founders of startups is that they can be sensitive and protective around what they've built. You have an emotional attachment to the early marketing and technology materials, and you don't want to hear that anything's wrong with them.

In Silicon Valley, if you spend a lot of time thinking about the obstacles, you'll talk yourself out of everything, because the more you look at it, the less logical something sounds, since no one has done it yet.

We like to say at Khosla Ventures, and this is one of the reasons to do what we do, we'll take technical risks that nobody else will.

For a first-time entrepreneur, there's nothing better than being in Silicon Valley because there is so much going on, and there's such a large number of inventors, that even a B level idea or a C level idea could be nurtured and be given venture capital there.

In Delicious's case, it's a great brand that belongs in Silicon Valley.

When we first invested in Red Hat, it was thought to be totally insane. When we funded MySQL, it was only partly insane.

There's a new generation of entrepreneurs in the Valley who have arrived since 2000, after the dotcom bust. They're completely fearless.

In the space of three weeks, I met a fair bunch of the guys who were just starting those little programmers' co-ops, and everybody was talking about starting businesses.

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.