Brad Feld Quotes

Good decisions can have bad short-term outcomes but be great for the business long-term.

I keep anywhere between 5-10 percent of my net worth in venture ideas.

Start small; get to know the landscape. We take risks but not major risks. We always started with small capital - €4m in Holland, $10m in Russia - and as we get to know the landscape of a country, we think about other businesses.

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

What an entrepreneur does is to build for the long run. If the market is great, you get all of the resources you can. You build to it. But a good entrepreneur is always prepared to throttle back, put on the brakes, and if the world changes, adapt to the world.

Many entrepreneurs have shifted their focus to pursuing VC funding as a primary strategic priority instead of concentrating on generating value for their users. This is worrisome because raising capital alone is misleading as a benchmark for success.

When it comes to investing, there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all portfolio.

I don't think you should ever start a business and move in a direction where you can't see it becoming a business.

Today, I think a CFO needs to be more of an operating CFO: someone who's using the financial data and the data of the company to help drive strategy, the allocation of capital, and the management of risks.

I'd stay away from investments in a variety of sectors that are capital intensive. Anyone who says we need $100 million before we know if what we're doing makes sense and the customers want it - that's not going to work.

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

My own view is that every company requires a long-term view.

A good financial plan is a road map that shows us exactly how the choices we make today will affect our future.

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

If you're not a risk taker, you should get the hell out of business.

I always tell my partners that our job is to fund all the companies we can that can be worth $10 billion or more. That's such a difficult constraint, we can't have any other constraints.

It's important to choose initial investors who are not twitchy and rushing for an exit. Wall Street's quarter-by-quarter lens may make the CEO make sub-optimal long-term decisions.

Management is all about managing in the short term, while developing the plans for the long term.

We need investors who plant and grow, not reap and run.

I'm a strong believer that you can build great companies in time of both greed and fear. But you have to be paying attention and operating under the right assumptions. You don't have to believe history repeats itself, but you should accept that history rhymes.

What I like to say when you get into something that feels like a bubble or, at least, feels irrational is that you still want to build a company that has a strong discipline, business-building culture.

Mitt Romney understands free enterprise, he has worked in it. He has seen companies succeed and he has seen them fail, too. He knows what people think about when they invest their money.

Unlike a normal venture fund, we never stop raising capital. We can always absorb new capital on the platform and into the next deal as long as we feel it won't distort the allocation and the pricing.

We need to divorce ourselves from venture capital as an occupation and focus on using capital as a way to take really big bets on things that just seem totally audacious.

We have never shied away from making investments. Even during downcycles, we never stopped our investments.