Michael Seibel Quotes

Once a few Facebook employees put together a promising idea and start a company, that's very exciting to people. I happen to think being a Facebook employee is really correlated with good ideas.

Sometimes people think Y Combinator has big ideas about themes. But really, we just fund the best startups.

I actually made a website called Y2 Combinator, which was the Y Combinator that starts Y Combinator clones. There's a very clear difference in the quality between the companies that come from YC and the companies that don't.

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.

IndieBio's capital, facilities and deep mentoring by a network of biotech specific experts have the potential to spawn the Google's, Facebook's and Instagram's of biology.

If you want to build a startup that has a good chance of succeeding, don't listen to me. Listen to Paul Graham and others who are applying tons of data to the idea of startup success. That will maximize your chance of being successful.

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?

Every kid coming out of Harvard, every kid coming out of school now thinks he can be the next Mark Zuckerberg, and with these new technologies like cloud computing, he actually has a shot.

The point of an accelerator is to teach you about companies and business, not about technology.

The big success stories - Facebook, Zynga and Twitter - are leading to investing in ideas on a napkin, because no one wants to miss out on the next big thing.

There are plenty of things I wish I'd known when I decided to quit my position at IBM and work on the idea that later became TaskRabbit. Maybe that's why one of the things I cherish most about being a founder and CEO is the opportunity to offer advice to new entrepreneurs.

I've always been an entrepreneur. I start businesses for a living.

Academics are becoming much more entrepreneurial these days.

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.

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

Loopt wouldn't have happened without Y Combinator.

My dream was to set up my own e-commerce company. In 1999, I gathered 18 people in my apartment and spoke to them for two hours about my vision. Everyone put their money on the table, and that got us $60,000 to start Alibaba. I wanted to have a global company, so I chose a global name.

The venture industry is both quite vibrant and quite competitive.

We are shifting from a managerial society to an entrepreneurial society.

If you look at where the tried and true of Silicon Valley VC's are investing, it's in people who understand what it takes, who've been through it and have a network of people they can tap and resources to pull together.

Google was a venture-funded company. Being part of that brings an energy to the company.

One of the things we urge Y-Combinator companies to do is to have profitability in grasp. If you need to get profitable before your A round of money, you ought to be able to do that.

I want to create an environment where I can create technology, get it into the hands of someone to market it, and move on to other technologies so I can keep innovating. I want to be a serial entrepreneur: Incubate an idea, get it to a good state, and make that an enabler to get to the next state. It's every researcher's fantasy.

Look at MIT—the smartest people in the world. They start up 50 companies a year. Only 1 makes it.

In getting Under Armour started, like any business, I think, number one, you need a great idea. But it's also about who you know.