Aileen Lee Quotes

I think there are a lot of companies that are staying private longer. Much more of their growth is happening while they are on the private side. So their valuations are hitting $1 billion while they are still private more often.

Venture capital is about capturing the value between the startup phase and the public company phase.

Venture-backed startups with billion dollar market caps are called 'unicorns' because they are supposed to be rare mythical creatures that few entrepreneurs will ever ride.

I've had two IPOs: with Etsy in 2015 and Cloudera in 2016. There have also been a ton of trade sales in my portfolio.

You go public because you want access to capital in the form of debt and equity.

I wanted to be a venture capitalist and join Sequoia Capital. They've financed and helped built some really special and enormously successful companies, including Google, Yahoo, Paypal, YouTube, Cisco, Oracle, Apple, and also Zappos.

You can't have personal investors anymore because it's too expensive, so you have to have corporate investment or a lot of rich people.

Even if a company is taken private, at some stage people want to make it public.

There is no country in the world where it's as easy to find venture capital in the stock market as the United States.

There was a time when I was wondering about this business of going public, so I visited about a half-dozen companies in the Boston area, all of them formed by MIT faculty and all had gone public.

There's a number of companies clearly that we wish we had invested in either at the early or at the moderate stage.

While I wouldn't say that most entrepreneurs find it easy to get funding, there are certainly more people out there funding technology and healthcare companies than in other areas.

A lot of people offered me to go public, but I have always rejected it.

The Internet Treasure companies tend to go public rather than get acquired, although there are clear exceptions, like Instagram, YouTube, Skype and PayPal.

This is a bit like big-game hunting. You look for companies of a certain size that deserve to be public.

When I started in the business in 1999 and 2000, we had companies that were going public in two, three or four years.

I don't understand why young entrepreneurs feel this pressure to take venture capital or go public. Don't get me wrong: Public companies are A-OK with me. I just think there is another way. Staying private is a lot more sane.

With tech startups, it's all loose-goosie. You raise money as you go, often from friends, family and investors.

I've actually taken companies public, I've actually busted companies, I've actually gone broke.

Just like I gave Jack Ma and Alibaba the luxury of staying private for longer, I am now giving Arm the gift of being private. My only message to them now is take my investment and let's go, go, go.

Startups are constantly raising money, sometimes before they have even hired a lawyer.

There is no correlation between a weak IPO market and an impact on early-stage VCs.

When companies are private, founders can share more about their future dreams with investors; report less; and the shares are illiquid, constraining short-term changes in valuation.

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.

I wish I had invested in the series A of Snapchat and Uber.