Gerald J. Ford Quotes

I'm used to doing big undertakings with my own money.

When you - when you - and this is still going on today - are making your money by pushing paper around, when you should be making your money by investing venture capital in various job-creating things, that makes it much harder to recover.

You're only the boss if you put up your own money.

For resourceful tech founders, finding capital is rarely a problem; making the best use of it is another story. A few years slinging pepperoni pies and chicken wings - on tiny margins and with minimal investment - might not be the worst fiscal training.

When you collect bad loans... you sure learn a lot about making good ones. You also learn a lot about the power of persuasion, persistence and desperation.

I make money using my brains and lose money listening to my heart. But in the long run my books balance pretty well.

We have this culture of financialization. People think they need to make money with their savings rather with their own business. So you end up with dentists who are more traders than dentists. A dentist should drill teeth and use whatever he does in the stock market for entertainment.

There are lots of ways to make money in venture capital, and there are even more ways to be mediocre. The industry has too much money and too many smart people chasing too few great entrepreneurs.

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.

I started LearnVest with a tiny savings account where I paid designers, technologists, and even bartered... Because I started with paying for things myself with my own savings, it sharpened my focus of how to spend money.

Money without brains is always dangerous.

I learned how to lend money by cleaning up the messes of others who had made loans before me.

What the banking system needs is creditors who monitor risk and cut their exposure when that risk is too high. Unlike regulators, creditors and counterparties know the details of a deal and have their own money on the line.

I believe wealth should be in the hands of those who know how to create more wealth.

Most small-business owners have no financial education when they started. They weren't trained to be entrepreneurs.

Money doesn't make me - I make the money.

While we would typically encourage young people to start saving for the future as early as possible, it's unlikely that a budding entrepreneur will be able to do so. The entrepreneur will need every bit of capital available for the business, which will likely crowd out personal savings.

A lot of financial technology is foolhardy. Saying, 'We're going to kill banks. We're going to disrupt everything,' ignores some realities.

Startup investing is one of my things, but it is not my everything.

My father worked in currency exchange, and my mother is a businesswoman.

Given the success rate, if you want to get wealthy, entrepreneurship is a horrible way of doing it. There are significantly easier ways of doing it.

You want to make sure you're aware of who's dealing with your money, what it's doing, and how you can save.

At base, financial literacy is inextricably connected to control over one's future.

As an entrepreneur, it's easy to feel ownership over every aspect of your business because you're putting your reputation, your money, and other people's money on the line. Oh, and you're sleeping, breathing, and eating your passion project - that, too. But if you try to do it all yourself, you're almost certain to fail.

Floyd has done a lot for me financially and has taught me a lot about business. He did great in making money during his career and he tells me a lot of what he's working on.