-
If you don't have a VP Finance on your team reporting to you, do yourself, your team, and your investors a favor and go hire one right now.
-
My wife is a writer. She grew up in Alaska. She told me she was moving to Boulder and that I could come with her if I wanted to. We were married at the time, so I chose to come with her.
-
Both SOPA and PIPA are toxic. My view is that anyone who supports these bills either doesn't understand what they are supporting or is simply no friend of innovation. And, if you are no friend of innovation, I can't support you in any way, as innovation is the lifeblood of our economy, our country, and what I've dedicated my life to.
-
I love dreams.
-
Taking a great new idea with an entrepreneurial team that wants to create something significant and trying to build a real company is what is interesting.
-
I watched my parents act as completely equal partners in their relationship, and as a son to a woman I respect immensely, I never thought of gender inequality as a child.
-
If the crisis lasts moments, rapid action is critical. But if it's simply the beginning of a broader issue, especially one where the root cause isn't known yet, the worst thing a leader can do is act immediately.
-
My optimism holds that the good guys eventually come out on top.
-
I feel like an email cross-dresser - I use a Microsoft product on my Apple product to access my Google product.
-
What I'm looking for in my interaction is critical thinking on the part of the person pitching to me.
-
A lot of times, when I interact with someone for the first time, I don't want to see the presentation.
-
I'm an optimistic person, and I tend to bury my cynicism in what I read and the movies I watch. My optimism holds that the good guys eventually come out on top.
-
I believe that all men and women are created equal, but it took our country until 1920 to acknowledge this for women. And then it took until 1964, the year before I was born, to outlaw discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. And same-sex marriage became the law of the land in 2015.
-
In entrepreneurial circles, it's clear to me that violence, hatred, and discrimination - or whatever you want to label it - is another category where we need to pay attention to disruption before it changes the world in ways we don't want it to.
-
For a long time, I've ranted against naming your startup community 'Silicon Whatever.' Instead, I believe every startup community already has a name. The Boulder startup community is called Boulder. The L.A. startup community is called L.A. The Washington D.C. startup community is called Washington D.C.
-
As an investor, I'm always looking for the next great American company. Who will create tomorrow's Twitter, Facebook, or Google?
-
I was afraid people wouldn't take me seriously, or would stop respecting me, if I talked about how bad I was feeling. The only people I talked openly about it with was my business partner, Dave Jilk, and my girlfriend - now wife - Amy Batchelor. They were amazingly supportive, but even then, I was deeply ashamed about my weaknesses.
-
I have shifted my mindset in terms of how companies should... focus on building amazing products. If you have amazing products, the marketing of those products is trivial.
-
Ever since I learned about the concept of garbage collection in 6.001 at MIT in 1984 while using Scheme on HP Chipmunks, I've always thought of dreaming as the same as garbage collection for a computer.
-
I can't tell you the number of people who pitched something and have no idea whom they are pitching it to. They don't know the background of the investor.
-
When I struggled with a depressive episode in 2013, I realized that I had a glitch in my thinking about my own motivation. I had separated learning and teaching into different concepts.
-
I especially love right-now sci-fi: stuff that happens in current time but incorporates a scientific breakthrough that is currently being explored.
-
St. Louis has a great startup scene and a vibrant business community.
-
When we raised the first Foundry Group fund in 2007, we took over 100 first meetings. We told our story several hundred times. As part of it was a slide called 'Strategy.' I still repeat the elements of that slide regularly, a decade later, as our core strategy has not changed.