Julie Wainwright Quotes

Small businesses are a risky proposition, and most celebrities want a home run.

I have seen entrepreneurs ask for hundreds of millions of dollars on a concept and try to sell because of 'their passion' for an idea. If the idea is that good, why wouldn't I cut you out and hire someone who is just as passionate for much, much less?

Well, I think that there's a very thin dividing line between success and failure. And I think if you start a business without financial backing, you're likely to go the wrong side of that dividing line.

If your business had no risk, you could go get a bank loan and call it a day. VCs like risks - without them, venture capital wouldn't exist. But they need to be risks that VCs are good at assessing and managing.

I believe Twitter, right now, is just finishing the venture capital phase, getting into a maturity level.

Whenever you start a new business, the sheer number of variables at hand makes failure a constant possibility.

We've only made three investments: Facebook, Groupon, and Zynga.

Business? It's quite simple; it's other people's money.

When you've got a great business going, you go open another and take the risk of losing the whole thing. It's fun!

The venture industry is both quite vibrant and quite competitive.

For me, the risks in terms of opening that brewpub were fairly high. I put my house up as collateral, I invested the liquid money I had and two years of my time to get it over, but that's really not much of a risk for what the potential reward was if it worked.

In technology, most things fail. Most companies fail.

We all get into business, and we take a risk in terms of putting capital.

If I had taken money from, say, venture capital, they would have wanted a certain return in a certain time period. McDonald's, on the other hand, seemed very interested in my passion about creating this brand. I trusted them, and they did not really interfere with the brand.

I'm a firm believer of the venture capitalist-style approach to solving problems. Rather than doing many small things that you hope add up, it's much more effective to work on projects that are high risk and high reward.

A startup job is an investment, after all: Venture capitalists may wager money, but you're staking something more precious - your time. And unlike VCs, you can't spread your risk by betting on a bunch of companies at once. Start with TAM. That's 'total addressable market,' and if it's not big enough, there's no point in talking.

The reality in business and in 'Dragons' Den' is you win some, and you lose some.

One of the things that's so interesting when talking to minority founders specifically is that there is really a knowledge gap in understanding what the risk-reward profile is for doing a startup.

Most startups flame out or just muddle along. Your chances of spotting a unicorn, pre-horn, are incalculably small. But if, knowing that, you still want to toss aside your cushy job, at least listen to corporate vets who have made the transition.

Being an entrepreneur is all about risk. Being an entrepreneur is like going to Vegas every day and shoving all of your chips into the middle of the table every single day.

A lot of people want to start a business, and they're like, 'I wanna start a business, give me some money to invest.' Where is your business plan? Are you investing money yourself into your own business? How is this going to work? People think that they can just come to you with an idea and have money.

Shark Tank's participatory. There's so many people on Twitter for this show, and they all feel like they're in the tank, making calls on this stuff.

Whether by design or circumstance, every startup will eventually get disrupted.

Entrepreneurs love to view risk as binary. The more you put on the line, the greater the potential for reward.

I myself am also a small investor in Slack, and one can count four to five IM platforms that were launched by Skype alumni alone.