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| Nov 21, 2008 in Quotes |  1 |
"The entrepreneurs that are out there today, and until the recession ends, are the missionaries and not the mercenaries. This means the guys looking for funding are purposed to raise money and build out their idea. It is not about the money it is about changing the world."
Charlie Paparelli
| Nov 14, 2008 in Quotes | 0 |
"Everybody's worth less. The ecosystem takes a hit as a whole.''
In a Bloomberg interview.
| Nov 07, 2008 in Quotes | 0 |
"This is our time, to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim the American dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth, that, out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope. And where we are met with cynicism and doubts and those who tell us that we can't, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes, we can."
President-Elect Barack Obama
At a rally in Chicago, Illinois, after winning the presidency Tuesday night.
You can watch the speech here. On his blog.
Or apply for a job.
Regardless of your political leanings you have to respect the transparency.
| Oct 31, 2008 in Quotes | 0 |
"A rational individual should abstain from voting."
As quoted in this wonderful article by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt, the authors of Freakonomics.
When Abby, my wife, read the above she quipped "Only irrational people voting certainly explains a lot."
| Oct 24, 2008 in Quotes | 0 |
"Babe Ruth had only one home run. He just kept hitting it over and over again."
In response to an analysts question that Apple was limiting its opportunity in the phone market by only having one SKU (stock keeping units). If you care to listen the discussion starts around the 54:12 mark of the call.
And unless I am mistaken Apple currently has three different SKUs. 8GB black, 16GB black, and 16GB white.
| Oct 17, 2008 in Quotes | 0 |
I had a rather classic quote lined up this week.
"What lies behind us and lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
And then a ran across this gem and decided a modern take was appropriate.
"And if you're worried about threats to the survival of your company, don't look for them in the news. Look in the mirror."
Paul Graham
You should read Paul's essay on why to start a startup in a bad economy.
| Oct 10, 2008 in Quotes | 1 |
Raising capital will be much more difficult now.
You should lower your “burn rate” to raise at least 3-6 months or
more of funding via cost reductions, even if it means staff reductions
and reduced marketing and G&A expenses. This is the equivalent to
“raising an internal round” through cost reductions to buy you more
time until you need to raise money again; hopefully when fund raising
is more feasible. Letting go of staff is hard and often gut wrenching.
A re-evaluation of timelines and re-focus on milestones with the eye of
doing more with less will allow you to live many more days, and the
name of the game in this environment in some
respects is survival–survival until conditions change.
If you are in a funding cycle, you should raise your funding as soon as possible and raise as much as possible but face the fact that if you can’t raise money now you must cut costs.
In an email to his portfolio companies. Full text over on TechCrunch.
| Oct 03, 2008 in Quotes | 7 |
"So what should the government do? Eliminate those policies that generated the current mess. This means, at a general level, abandoning the goal of home ownership independent of ability to pay. This means, in particular, getting rid of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, along with policies like the Community Reinvestment Act that pressure banks into subprime lending.
The right view of the financial mess is that an enormous fraction of subprime lending should never have occurred in the first place. Someone has to pay for that. That someone should not be, and does not need to be, the U.S. taxpayer."
| Sep 26, 2008 in Quotes | 1 |
"You can do a lot of damage on Wall Street with a pen and a piece of paper."
Warren Buffett
"What Buffett has done is provide the government a roadmap to how to invest in struggling banks."
Aaron Task paraphrasing Larry White
"If I were Bush, McCain, or Obama (all three of them ideally) I'd send Paulson and Bernake to their cubicile and tell them to do the numbers and come back with the return projections before voting on this."
This is a special triple quote of the week but we are experiencing special times.
What Buffett did with his Goldman investment was get a 10% yield on preferred stock with 100% warrant coverage to buy common stock at an 8% discount on the stock price the day before the deal closed with some corporate oversight. Sounds like a good structure to me and one our government should follow going forward on any bailout.
What Fred is suggesting in his post are two things that any venture capitalist does in practice. Before doing the deal running the numbers establishing an expected value to determine if the deal should be done and if so tranche the payments.
Combine these together and I think you have we have a winner. Do you?
| Sep 19, 2008 in Quotes | 0 |
"The thing I like to see is three personality types at the beginning of a company. A director of engineering to build a demoable product. A CTO who can expound on a vision. And someone who is focused on building the company, selling the vision of the company, and marketing the company."
George does a pretty good job of defining a "good team" for an early stage technology startup. He made this statement in a panel entitled "20 Questions for VCs" at TechCrunch50 which I stumbled upon prepping for Meet the VC. You can watch the entire panel below. Lots of the same issues on the West coast as the East coast is my key takeaway.
Update: I threw out the video because the autoplay feature is annoying. You can view the video here.
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