Fred Wilson Quotes & Sayings (Page 4)

“Customers are a great way to finance a business for many reasons. First, customer financing is typically non dilutive. They want something from you other than equity in your business. Customers also help you fit your product to the market. And customers will help debug and improve the quality of the product.”

“If you are successful, you will be cloned. That's life. In fact, it's a sign that you've made it when clones of your website, mobile app, and business start cropping up.”

“My venture investing career has three phases, all roughly 6-8 years long. The first, at Euclid, was software to Internet. The second, at Flatiron, was Internet to bubble. And the third, at USV, has been web 2 to mobile. I have always used a new firm to denote a new investment phase for me. Throw away the old. Start with the new.”

“We need new medical approaches to preventing and/or curing disease. We need new scientific approaches to generating, storing, and being more efficient with energy. Maybe we need more space exploration. Maybe we need more undersea exploration.”

“Startups are rapidly changing systems. If you use an annual review cycle, you aren't getting feedback at the same pace that you need to adapt and change the business.”

“The most common way customer financing is done is you sell the customer on the product before you've built it or before you've finished it. The customer puts up the money to build the product or finish the product and becomes your first customer. Usually the customer simply wants the product and nothing more.”

“Being an entrepreneur is hard. Having supportive and caring investors helps.”

“All markets have boom and bust cycles, and I think venture capital market has even more exaggerated boom and bust cycles.”

“The venture business is a bit of an apprenticeship business, so the firm I worked for didn't let me make an investment until I was 30. That was probably a very smart thing.”

“Politics and government have been a terrible place to invest; education has been a terrible place to invest, but that is because the entrenched interests make it a terrible place to invest. The way you invest in those sectors is you go against the entrenched interests; you try and disrupt the entrenched interests, not to service them.”