Fred Wilson Quotes

Beware angel investors: they can be disruptive.

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

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

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.

Venture capitalists are professional money managers. We are provided capital to invest as long as we can return it to our investors with a strong return in a reasonable amount of time. A strong return is three times cash on cash. A reasonable amount of time is ten years max.

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.

I don't know the venture fund terms. I don't know what a seed round is. I want nothing to do with it.

The question for Dropbox is whether, when they run out of private sources for funding, they will be able to maintain that valuation when they go to public sources for funding and their valuation is set on the public markets.

In my experience, there are only two valid reasons to take a company public: access to growth capital and investor fatigue.

It used to be that you would go in to see a CEO, and you would ask them, 'Is your company for sale?' and if they said 'No, we have no interest in selling,' that was sort of the end of the conversation.

Venture capital is always wanting to go up market.

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.

I think one of the key differentiators I bring to the table as a venture capitalist is a solid understanding of the public markets and how they operate.

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

I think this is also a great time to invest in private equity, helping companies grow from the ground up.

In order to access private capital, you have to provide competitive return on investment. In order to give competitive returns to investors, you've got to operate on a profitable basis and be thinking of yourself as a business.

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.

Venture capital is debt. People don't understand that.

In an era of endless innovation and constant disruption, what is any company really worth? How does a startup determine its valuation?

I have never had a situation where an investee company would have a good value by having a banker. Investment bankers are there to please future clients. You are a temporary client; they are therefore not to get you the best valuation.

I'm a very active angel investor in a number of different companies.

I'm hard-pressed to think of companies that don't need venture capital that are going after big opportunities. I think, in almost all cases, if they're going after big opportunities, they are going to need to raise quite a bit of money.