Bill Maris Quotes

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.

Often, investors will discover a manager after he's had a terrific run, usually when he lands on a magazine cover somewhere. Invariably, funds swell up with new investor money just before they revert to their long-term averages.

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

We believe the size is almost irrelevant to investment success. Our size has certainly not diminished our enthusiasm for investing in our funds, our ability to find or create opportunities, or our performance outlook.

Mutual fund managers are trapped in this rather deadly vicious circle: the more successful they are, the more money flows into their mutual fund. Then, it is more difficult for them to beat the market averages or even to match their own past performance.

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 Vanguard Experiment was designed to prove that mutual funds could operate independently, and do so in a manner that would directly benefit their shareholders.

My role has been limited to focus on fiduciary obligations to our investors as a general partner of our funds.

The individual dynamics going on within a venture fund are critically important to you. Unfortunately, they're also very opaque.

We are all dependent upon the investment of capital.

Every time we make an investment decision at FedEx, we ask ourselves: 'What is the return on this investment?'

There were two qualities about the mutual funds of the 1920s that made them extremely speculative. One was that they were heavily leveraged. Two, mutual funds were allowed to invest in other mutual funds.

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.

An investor doesn't have a prayer of picking a manager that can deliver true alpha.

If you don't trust someone to look after your investments, then they shouldn't be doing the job for you.

You can't have bank holding companies acting as hedge funds. You can't have them taking a million-dollar pension plan for Joe Schmo the bus driver and treat it with the same risk appetite that you treat George Soros' pocket money. It's fundamentally ridiculous.

Sometimes your best investments are the ones you don't make.

Successful hedge funds will be entrepreneurial; it is the essence of the craft.

Investors tend to discover 'hot' mutual fund managers just after a successful run and just before the inescapable force of mean reversion is about to kick in.

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

The role of private equity as fiduciaries is certainly to make money.

Mutual fund managers want your money in their funds. They get paid based on assets under management.

Whether a tops-down or bottoms-up investor in bonds, stocks, or private equity, the standard analysis tends to judge an investor or his firm on the basis of how the bullish or bearish aspects of the cycle were managed.

I'm a pretty disciplined investor and pretty disciplined buyer. I do my due diligence. I do my homework. I don't waste money.

I might make an investment and lose some money, but that's something I can recover from.