Investment Criteria Quotes

I consider each business investment based on concept and revenue.

If the pitch starts with a sob story, I'm out. If the pitch talks about personal issues, I'm out. If the pitch starts off with how big the market opportunity is, I'm out. If the pitch tells me what is unique about the product, how it can make a profit, and it's an area where I have expertise, I will read on.

The key to making money in angel investing is saying no. You meet with 100 companies and say no to 99 of them.

In business, I look for economic castles protected by unbreachable 'moats'.

Generally I'm wide open to people; I love helping them in any way I possibly can. But for me to invest, a business has to have a lot of creative scale; it has to be unique.

One of the best investors around, Joel Greenblatt, has written a popular, charming and funny book about investing in great companies at low P/E multiples. To simplify an already simple book, great companies are generally measured as companies that can generate lots of profit without requiring a lot of capital. This means that they have high ROEs.

I almost never invest in ideas or plans, so you'll need to have a company and at least a product, if not customers.

The bad news is that most traditional VCs have a youth bias that they will state very overtly. You always wonder if that's a self-fulfilling prophecy or if it's something about the nature of those businesses.

VCs are good at asking questions.

Our investments continue to be few in number and simple in concept: The truly big investment idea can usually be explained in a short paragraph. We like a business with enduring competitive advantages that is run by able and owner-oriented people. When these attributes exist, and when we can make purchases at sensible prices, it is hard to go wrong (a challenge we periodically manage to overcome).

As an investor, what we're not looking for is 'oh this is a cool app,' it's 'is this something that can become a big business?' You need to find those that can become real businesses.

I look at Boston-based companies all the time... There's certainly great companies in Boston. If the deal makes sense on the merit of the deal itself, we'll go and do the deal.

When selecting businesses, I first have to be enticed by the product or the industry they are in. Then I look for passion. If a company has these two qualifiers, I go for it.

We think the most important criteria for selecting an investment firm are the manager, team, and track record.

We raised $10 million in 2011. Our rule was, we wouldn't accept money from anybody we didn't want to have dinner with.

I look at two things while angel investing. Are you solving an important problem? Do you care about the end users.

We reviewed our process at Greylock and discovered that the best investments are non-obvious enough that they result in a mixed vote by our partnership.

At Foundry Group, we always look for companies that we think build magic into their products. Occipital has been one of those companies.

It is our argument that a sufficiently low price can turn a security of mediocre quality into a sound investment opportunity - provided that the buyer is informed and experienced and he practices adequate diversification. For, if the price is low enough to create a substantial margin of safety, the security thereby meets our criterion of investment.

So some guy may know how to make money in cocoa beans, but I don't so I just let him have that. But it's got to be something I understand. It's got to be a business with fundamentally good economics. It's got to be a management that I like and trust and admire. And it's got to be a price that makes sense.

We never invest in a male; we never invest in a female. We just invest in the right entrepreneur.

We have 35 different criteria when deciding on the location of a data centre. Tax is one of them.

Many investors understandably want to do good while also doing well. But the standards for ESG investing are often unclear and sometimes contradictory.

Our criteria is that it's okay to invest in companies so long as they stop lobbying in Washington, stop exploring for new hydrocarbons, and sit down with every one else to plan to keep 80 percent of the reserves in the ground.

We say we are trying to buy into businesses with excellent economics, run by honest and able people at a decent price. We buy very few securities, so we look at it as "focused" investing.