Bill Maris People Quotations

You want to work with people you are excited about and they are excited about you. It's a two-way street.

Organizing healthcare information is a daunting task, but it is not an impossible task. We've had people walk on the moon. This is a lot more doable.

The reality is if you were going to die tomorrow, and someone offered you another 10 years, most people would take those 10 years.

We're looking for people who are working on things that seem out of reach, uncomfortably difficult.

The reality is the technology exists now to extend life and have people live healthier, happier lives. Not to be kind of immortal - that's not what I'm talking about.

There are a lot of billionaires in Silicon Valley, but in the end, we are all heading to the same place. If given the choice between making a lot of money or finding a way to make people live longer, what do you choose?

We can get much better outcomes from people if we understand the genetic basis of the exact cancer that they have, what interventions might be most effective against it, what's worked in the past and what hasn't.

You make a great investment in the consumer Internet, maybe you make a lot of money and create something useful, interesting, or fun. But in life sciences, you have a chance to be part of something that lets people live longer and healthier and not lose the people they care about. That is really profound.

With a regular venture fund, you raise, let's say, a billion dollars, and then over the next three or four years, you've got to invest that money; otherwise, the people who invested with you will say, 'What are you doing? You're just collecting fees on our money.'

People talk about the redistribution of wealth a lot, which is a very valid topic. But what about the redistribution of health? That's even more concentrated at the top.

Back in the late 1990s, venture capitalists got very excited about the Internet. A whole lot of money was poured into some companies that failed rather spectacularly, and a lot of people lost a lot of money.

As life expectancy extends beyond 80 years in some parts of the world, more people are struggling with brain diseases. For older people, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and other conditions become a major impediment to quality of life.

Not many venture firms have people whose job is to read academic research - on startups, ventures, and entrepreneurs - and gather knowledge from that.

If you're a technology investor, and you decide that you're also going to be a healthcare investor or a green-tech investor, that doesn't usually work out that well. There are reasons why people make their careers studying these things and becoming experts.