Michael Seibel Quotes

Jeremy Stoppelman started Yelp. Max Levchin started Slide. I started LinkedIn. It was a mininova explosion of folks jumping out to doing other entrepreneurial activities.

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

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.

I think the issues around diversity of all kinds are really a huge problem in the startup world.

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

I was born in Africa. I came to California because it's really where new technologies can be brought to fruition, and I don't see a viable competitor.

The market is ridiculously overcrowded with early stage investors. This results in a talent drain, where the best talent gets diffused and work for their own startups.

Silicon Valley has evolved a critical mass of engineers and venture capitalists and all the support structure - the law firms, the real estate, all that - that are all actually geared toward being accepting of startups.

Silicon Valley has some of the smartest engineers and technology business people in the world.

I kept being told, 'If you really want to build a start up, you have to be in San Francisco,' so I ended up taking out a suitcase. It did occur to me to do it in London but it's very, very difficult to build a start up in London - so I guess I was being lazy.

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.

My friends are people who like building cool stuff. We always have this joke about people who want to just start companies without making something valuable. There's a lot of that in Silicon Valley.

I have always been very tech-focused, which you may almost say is the traditional CEO in Silicon Valley.

I think Yandex is something in between two different cultures. One originated from the old Soviet culture of the scientific institute. It was a free atmosphere of scientists, maybe too free because nobody cared about making money. Another origin is something close to what you usually see in California startups.

As the tech industry continues to grow and sprout successful startups across the country, it is important that we understand our responsibility to affect positive change in our communities.

Little startups are ridiculously overfunded.

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.

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.

Most of the largest software companies in the world today are based on Oracle, and they were once startups.

It suddenly occurred to me that the hottest tech startups are solving all the problems of being 20 years old, with cash on hand, because that's who thinks them up.

What makes Silicon Valley really work? It's a unique combination of great educational institutions - especially at Stanford - that generate engineers and a culture that starts companies.

The best training ground in the world is Silicon Valley and the tech space.

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.