Bill Maris Venture Quotations

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.'

Venture funds get beaten up for not investing in important things. Okay, if you want venture funds to invest in important things, then don't penalize or make fun of them when those important things don't work.

If I'm an entrepreneur, and I have a term sheet from Sequoia and Kleiner, that's the safe choice. Google Ventures is the brave choice.

Google Ventures has a direct financial incentive to ensure the companies we invest in succeed.

If I were to leave and raise a venture fund, I would have to find 10 or 100 LPs. They would all give me a bunch of money, and I would take a percentage of that to pay myself. They would expect me to invest that over the next three years, and they want that money back in seven or eight years.

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

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.