Quotes by Venture Capitalists

If you don't toot your own horn, don't complain that there's no music.
Guy Kawasaki
Do you know what the difference is between PR and advertising? Advertising is when you say how great you are. PR is when other people say how great you are. PR is better.
Guy Kawasaki
The beauty of Goodreads is that you know you’re sowing in a field where everyone, by definition and self-selection, loves to read.
Guy Kawasaki
•tPeople deserve a break. The stressed and unorganized person who doesn’t have the same priorities as you may be dealing with an autistic child, abusive spouse, fading parents, or cancer. Don’t judge people until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes. Give them a break instead.
Guy Kawasaki
I have a hardcore attitude: a “self-published, ghost-written book” is wrong because the concept behind self publishing is that you have knowledge or emotions that you want to express. Whenpeople read a book—particularly a self-published one—they have the right to expect that it’s the person’s writing, not cleaned-up dictation or slapping a name on a book that someone else wrote.
Guy Kawasaki
Writingis therapeutic. It helps you cope with issues that seem gargantuan at the time.The process of expressing yourself about a problem, editing your thoughts, andwriting some more can help you control issues that you face.
Guy Kawasaki
Starting your book is only the first five miles of a twenty-six-mile marathon that’s one-third of a triathlon (authoring, publishing, and entrepreneuring).
Guy Kawasaki
Go APE: Author a great book, Publish it quickly, and Entrepreneur your way to success. Self-publishing isn’t easy, but it’s fun and sometimes even lucrative. Plus, your book could change the world.
Guy Kawasaki
A successful self-publisher must fill three roles: Author, Publisher, and Entrepreneur—or APE.
Guy Kawasaki
Successful companies are started, and made successful, by at least two, and usually more, soulmates.
Guy Kawasaki
Each year about 600,000 start-ups are launched. Less than 0.5 percent attract VC. Of Inc. magazine's annual list of the 500 fastest growing companies in the United States assessed over a decade (1997–2007), less than 20 percent of companies were venture backed” -“62.4 percent of VC investments were completely lost while 3.1 percent of the investments accounted for 53 percent of the profits for roughly 600 investments
Mahendra Ramsinghani
A good portfolio manager knows which companies to keep and which ones to let go. Many a GP has struggled with portfolio companies that cannot meet their value-creation milestones, or raise additional follow-on rounds of capital, or generate target returns in a time span of, say, five to seven years. The faster you recognize those losses, the better it is.”-“As David Cowan says, “Just focus on your top five—the rest is distraction.” The harder part of the investor's discipline is to know when to quit.”-“You have to constantly scan all of those things and be willing to adjust your own sense of what's a reasonable outcome and move the company into a position where it has the maximum chance to succeed. ”-“Time is your enemy: Portfolio companies always take twice as much capital and twice as long to exit. Early-stage companies rarely meet milestones as planned and always burn cash faster than anticipated.
Mahendra Ramsinghani
Amidst all the hype and hoopla around this business, I wanted to emphasize the challenge—it is seductive but the failure rate is very high. And those who fail have no good place to go.
Mahendra Ramsinghani
The wisest course of action is to take your best shot with a prototype, immediately get it to market, and iterate quickly. If you wait for ideal circumstances in which you have all the information you need (which is impossible), the market will pass you by.
Guy Kawasaki
Doing, not learning to do, is the essence of entrepreneurship.
Guy Kawasaki
Never go into venture capital if you want a peaceful life.
Georges F. Doriot
A magnificent cause can overcome a prickly personality, but your ability to enchant people increases if they like you, so you should aspire to both. You’ll know that you’re likeable when you can communicate freely, casually, and comfortably with people.
Guy Kawasaki
Until we make the unconscious conscious, we will be dictated by it and call it fate.
Jerry Colonna
A popular Harvard business professor urged his students to read the obituaries in the New York Times before they read anything else, in order to learn from the lives of great men.
Georges F. Doriot
Want to change the world? Upset the status quo? This takes more than run-of-the-mill relationships. You need to make people dream the same dream that you do.
Guy Kawasaki
A persons emotions should be the strength, should not be the weakness
Sharath Nazre
While we're living, we need to get over ourselves and accept others if we want to enchant people.
Guy Kawasaki
You talk to leadership in China, and THEY are all the engineers. They get what is going on immediately. The Americans don't because they're all lawyers.
John Doerr
The more you conquer fear, the more you become stronger.., For that don't let the More Evil in.
Sharath Nazre
Let yourself be enchanted in small ways.
Guy Kawasaki