John Simon Quotes

I hope that my investment into Atomico will become my best financial investment to date.

I'd been a great angel investor, but professional venture capital was clearly not the right thing for me.

Great investments may look crazy but really may not be.

Venture capital is unscalable. Production equals the time each partner has.

Producers are not gamblers. They want a good return on their investment.

I won't say that 'shotgun' is the word I'd prefer to use, but we certainly do a lot of investments.

Loving something doesn't make it a good investment.

Most VC firms are looking to bring in women because of the great consumer cycle.

Chelsea have made a good investment for me, but I did not put any pressure on them.

Spice Market was just a big investment on lots of different levels.

Private equity is a science project for many, many years, and when you have a science project, it leaves the human beings as a secondary fact.

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

When it comes to money, the best investments were probably the ones I did not make.

If companies are able to raise equity from the market, then their problems for financing incomplete projects will come to end. Investment cycle in the capital market can kick-start with the money of savers and investors.

Empowering innovations require long-term investments, which tie up capital for years and years. So companies are using capital to create more capital, and consequently, the world is awash in capital, but the innovations we need to advance aren't there.

I'm always investing. I'm constantly in talks with someone about some opportunity.

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.

The Interros strategy toward various assets generally depends on the stage of their development and level of their maturity.

With a regular venture fund, you raise, let's say, a billion dollars, and then over the next three or four years, you've got to invest that money; otherwise, the people who invested with you will say, 'What are you doing? You're just collecting fees on our money.'

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.

When I see people laughing at ideas and companies we have backed, I smile. It means we are going to make a lot of money on that investment.

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.

Everyone in this room is making investments in oil companies through taxes. Everyone in this room is investing money in hedge funds. They don’t need that money. We need to make the right investments.

Well private money can take risks in a way that government money often isn't willing to.

I have a saying: There are no brave old people in finance. Because if you're brave, you mostly get destroyed in your 30s and 40s. If you make it to your 50s and 60s and you're still prospering, you have a very good sense of how to avoid problems and when to be conservative or aggressive with your investments.