Naval Ravikant Quotes

I hear so many startups talking about how they can raise VC instead of questioning whether they need it in the first place.

I started a business with two guys I played with, Ronnie Lott and Harris Barton: Champion Ventures, it's a fund of funds. We have $400 million or so under management.

When we raised the first Foundry Group fund in 2007, we took over 100 first meetings. We told our story several hundred times. As part of it was a slide called 'Strategy.' I still repeat the elements of that slide regularly, a decade later, as our core strategy has not changed.

I have definitely refocused Lowercase Capital on later-stage deals and my existing portfolio.

If you want to invest in early-stage technologies, putting a timeframe on it does behold you to Silicon Valley economics. You've got a certain time period where you have to make the money. And you have to invest that money whether you find good companies or not.

I keep anywhere between 5-10 percent of my net worth in venture ideas.

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.

I think this is also a great time to invest in private equity, helping companies grow from the ground up.

If companies are able to raise equity from the market, then their problems for financing incomplete projects will come to end. Investment cycle in the capital market can kick-start with the money of savers and investors.

I'd stay away from investments in a variety of sectors that are capital intensive. Anyone who says we need $100 million before we know if what we're doing makes sense and the customers want it - that's not going to work.

I always tell my partners that our job is to fund all the companies we can that can be worth $10 billion or more. That's such a difficult constraint, we can't have any other constraints.

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.'

Well private money can take risks in a way that government money often isn't willing to.

Returns matter a lot. It's our capital.

We need to divorce ourselves from venture capital as an occupation and focus on using capital as a way to take really big bets on things that just seem totally audacious.

Probably, if I created a venture fund, I would create a firm with virtual services not too different from the a16z model, but without employing people. So I would get CPOs, engineering talent, marketing people who wanted to be involved with the venture fund and provide services.

Good investors have to choose how to allocate their mind share with the precious capital they have.

It doesn't need to be consistently concentrated in these venture-capital funds and things like that.

You must take risks, both with your own money or with borrowed money. Risk taking is essential to business growth.

Most chief executives rise to that position by being good operating managers. Few have extensive experience or training with capital allocation. What CEO wants to return excess cash to shareholders when it could be used to expand his or her empire?

We have moved from treating funds as investment trusts designed to serve their owner-beneficiaries to treating funds as consumer products, designed to attract the largest possible assets. This new approach has ill-served the interests of fund shareholders.

There is a reason companies raise money from investors, which is to invest in growth.

If I were to spend investor money on nice furnishings and so forth, particularly early on, I might not have it for opportunities that can really grow our business.

I founded SkyBridge - an alternative investment management company focused on seeding and partnering with emerging managers and mentoring Wall Street's next generation of Wall Street's entrepreneurs - in 2005.

Most firms do two investments a year. They may talk to between 50 and 100 and do a couple, whereas we're talking to thousands and doing several hundred.