Small- and medium-sized businesses need access to a diverse range of finance options, including non-bank lending. These new forms of finance are still small in scale today but they should, over time, bring additional choice and greater competition to the lending market.
I focus on consumer Internet. Sometimes it's a working prototype; sometimes it's an idea on a napkin. I don't do a ton of deals a year, and I really like working with startups - it's the only way I can invest. It fits my ADD brain.
For me, seed investing isn't just a good return area but a big part of how we network in Silicon Valley. A lot of our best deals have come from being active in the seed stage.
The better I get at investing in and helping companies, the result is more founders who are excited to work with me and more of my wonderful limited partners insisting I take piles of their loot to keep it all going.
I often talk about the PayPal mafia out of San Francisco, people that were in PayPal and got out of PayPal and continue to reinvest in other start-ups and create a huge pay-it-forward type of network there.
Before Blockchain Capital, I was cranking out startups like an incubator.
The key to making money in angel investing is saying no. You meet with 100 companies and say no to 99 of them.
One thing I'd like to do is angel investing in small companies. That's what's exciting, and if you are lucky to have a bit of money, you can take those risks.
One thing I would like to see in Vancouver and Canada is something similar to the PayPal mafia. They were all early employees of PayPal. They all had monster exits with PayPal, and they were able to take their winnings and form a syndicate that co-invests.
VC has always been this high-touch, in-your-face-type business.
If you want to invest in early-stage technologies, putting a timeframe on it does behold you to Silicon Valley economics. You've got a certain time period where you have to make the money. And you have to invest that money whether you find good companies or not.
I have definitely refocused Lowercase Capital on later-stage deals and my existing portfolio.
I'd been a great angel investor, but professional venture capital was clearly not the right thing for me.
All throughout my life I have been deeply immersed in startups, either because I was running one or investing in them or helping them.
It is very hip to be an angel investor now. There used to be a dozen, two dozen guys at these demo days writing checks. Now there are hundreds.
Startup investing is one of my things, but it is not my everything.
I like the strategy of finding great entrepreneurs early, giving them some money, helping them a little - perhaps not as much as we would a regular core investment.
While I'm a venture capitalist who invests in early-stage tech companies, I often feel like a professional emailer and conference call maker.
I'm invested in about 13 private companies. I've advised probably another 50 private companies.
I wanted to be a venture capitalist and join Sequoia Capital. They've financed and helped built some really special and enormously successful companies, including Google, Yahoo, Paypal, YouTube, Cisco, Oracle, Apple, and also Zappos.
The best part of being an angel investor is seeing these kids coming up with companies that get way more traffic than Reddit had when we sold it. I think, 'Are you kidding me? They're just kids, and they've done so much.'
Kai-Fu's Innovation Works is the top very-early-stage fund in China. We are proud to be an investor, and hope that IW will help to produce in China companies on the scale of Facebook, Zynga, or Groupon.
I don't think a lot of people have been entrepreneurial about venture capital.
I've been lucky enough to be involved in a number of great startups, including eBay and Wikia as an entrepreneur and LinkedIn and Paypal as an investor.
I look at two things while angel investing. Are you solving an important problem? Do you care about the end users.
