Scott Weiss Quotes

Personally, I don't want to do a lot of angel deals in a year. I get approached a lot. I'm becoming less and less polite, which doesn't seem to be helping. A lot of the things I get pitched on are from people who just want to make money.

There's almost too much venture capital in India - there are issues with seed capital, but for venture capital, there's a lot money chasing deals here.

If you look at some of the smaller capital markets in Asia, when they want funding, they either come here to Hong Kong or they go to California, the mecca of the Internet, because they can capture the liquidity and then move on and do what they want to do, which is develop a business.

As a lot of the venture capital world seems to be shifting away from consumer, we want to make sure that consumer entrepreneurs know there's still money available.

If you're an entrepreneur, and you have a choice to go to a place where there are 250 VC firms or somewhere else where there might be one or two, you're gonna go where all the money is.

Venture capitalists are professional money managers. We are provided capital to invest as long as we can return it to our investors with a strong return in a reasonable amount of time. A strong return is three times cash on cash. A reasonable amount of time is ten years max.

The issue of access to growth capital is common to all entrepreneurs. Any entrepreneur who can demonstrate a credible business model and plan would be able to access to capital.

We are all dependent upon the investment of capital.

It's hard to overestimate how much the perception of the quality of the V.C. firm you're with matters - the signal it sends to other V.C.s, to potential employees, to customers, to the tech press. It's like where you went to college.

Women are starting something like twice as many companies as men, but the money is primarily going to companies started by men.

The key to making money in angel investing is saying no. You meet with 100 companies and say no to 99 of them.

We have co-opted seed funds. You know, Y Combinator, that was completely our money. We have secret handshakes with a whole bunch of people. Very dangerous, because word gets out that so-and-so's money is Sequoia's money, that would not be a good thing.

I'm one of the first invention capitalists.

Venture capital is unscalable. Production equals the time each partner has.

One of the things we urge Y-Combinator companies to do is to have profitability in grasp. If you need to get profitable before your A round of money, you ought to be able to do that.

We raised $10 million in 2011. Our rule was, we wouldn't accept money from anybody we didn't want to have dinner with.

One thing I'd like to do is angel investing in small companies. That's what's exciting, and if you are lucky to have a bit of money, you can take those risks.

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.'

Any new producer starting up is to get investors' confidence. Investors are still very very wary of anything to do with the arts world.

You see 6,000 times more tech companies in San Francisco than you see in Seattle. All the money is in San Francisco when you look at the venture fund maps. The PR is in San Francisco. The centricity of the industry is in San Francisco.

A hardware startup with no funding is a risky venture.

All markets have boom and bust cycles, and I think venture capital market has even more exaggerated boom and bust cycles.

For the good producer, raising capital is about the last thing to worry about. If you're good, the money comes very easily.

Where are the jobs going to come from? Small business, manufacturing and clean energy. Where's the money to finance them? The banks and the corporations in America today have lots of money that they can invest right now.

If that suffers in its credit, the Cause must suffer. If that fails, the Cause must fail.