Brian Lee Quotes

When I first started doing work on how the Internet is affecting commerce, like a lot of people, I was really excited by this nearly perfect market.

I love working with really early stage startups where the outcome is still in doubt. Maybe they'll go on to greatness, or maybe they'll never get off the runway at all.

The Internet produces new business models and also reinvents traditional business models.

We want to nurture startups on our platform, just like we did in the old world.

Flipkart is one of the most innovative companies in the way it approaches the market.

In the digital realm, companies are free from the friction of producing physical goods, and as a result, we see companies like Google go from zero dollars in revenues to billions at a much faster rate.

Now it's easy for someone to set up a storefront and reach the entire world in very modest ways. So these technologies that we thought would dis-intermediate traditional sellers gave more people the tools to be sellers. It also changed the balance of power between sellers and buyers.

Very ambitious startups often take a long time to work - or sometimes they take a very long time to look ambitious.

What we want to be is something completely new. There is no physical analog for what Amazon.com is becoming.

Amazon has well passed any expectations of its ability to change distribution and marketing.

By definition startups usually do not turn a profit.

Is there anyone out there who is the next Steve Jobs? I think Jeff Bezos is pretty close. He is very smart. He is extremely creative. He has completely reinvented the way in which commerce is done online.

The laws of business physics have been broken in terms of how many customers you can acquire and how fast. No one in history has ever acquired 450 million customers in the same amount of time that WhatsApp did.

It's a really paradoxical thing. We want to think big, but start small. And then scale fast. People think about trying to build the next Facebook as trying to start where Facebook is today, as a major global presence.

The Internet creates as well as destroys. Social networks, search advertising, and cloud computing are multibillion dollar industries that didn't exist 10 years ago. They are products of the same force that has rendered the Postal Service's core business obsolete.

When we look at investing, we always think about 'how defensible is this, how likely is it that somebody is going to copy this.' E-commerce tends to be something easy to copy because it's execution.

Investors have finally woken up to the fact that there is something called the 'Russian Internet' into which you can invest.

I would think that most of the online business will be conducted by traditional retailers and that over 90 per cent of the e-retailers will, in fact, all go out of business.

Many dotcoms recruited people from existing companies who were quite experienced in finance, marketing, distribution and other disciplines but not necessarily experienced in the Web culture.

There's no locality on the web - every market is a global market.

I'm just more excited about helping new entrepreneurs create the next Facebook or Google.

Not since the steam engine has any invention disrupted business models like the Internet. Whole industries including music distribution, yellow-pages directories, landline telephones, and fax machines have been radically reordered by the digital revolution.

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 Chinese market is very different. One of the things that I believe is that the biggest, hottest tech trend in China right now is O2O, or online-to-offline.

On AngelList, we get 100 new companies created a day. That's an insane flood.