I'm still in the first baby steps of my career, so I've got so much to learn and so much to figure out.
In the early days, start-ups make the main mistake of hiring people to do the work that they could do themselves.
The early stage of pregnancy for me is quite hard to hide.
For me, seed investing isn't just a good return area but a big part of how we network in Silicon Valley. A lot of our best deals have come from being active in the seed stage.
I'm still at the beginning of my career. It's all a little new, and I'm still learning as I go.
It happens a lot that a name actor will be signed on to a project in its germ stage.
The best early-stage venture capital investments appear obvious in retrospect; however, very few of them are actually obvious when you make them.
In the early days of a startup, people's compensation is whatever you negotiate with a founder and it's all over the place.
I really have become very interested at working with and helping entrepreneurs at the early stages of their growth.
For me, success is, during this early pilgrimage, to leave the woodpile a little higher than I found it.
We've only made three investments: Facebook, Groupon, and Zynga.
'Shark Tank' has been a sincere joy. As our traditional venture-backed companies get bigger, the investing side tends to get more political and complicated. 'Shark Tank' takes me back to my early days working with ambitious founders in their earliest and scrappiest days. The show reminds me of what I deeply love about this business.
Often, entrepreneurs don't build a board until they are forced to by their VCs when they raise their first financing round. This is dumb, as you are missing the opportunity to add at least one person to the team who - as a board member - can help you navigate the early process of building your company and raising that first round.
When you're a younger company, you struggle, struggle, struggle with, 'How are we going to pay the bills, and how are we going to hire people, and how are we going to get a bigger office?' Just managing the company is so hard.
I love working with really early stage startups where the outcome is still in doubt. Maybe they'll go on to greatness, or maybe they'll never get off the runway at all.
AI cloud is just very, very nascent.
I have seen a lot of now-great companies at their earliest stages, and these early-stage startups are not built by the senior people who know how to run and scale big-company machines.
The phrase 'change the world' is tossed around Silicon Valley conversations and business plans as freely as talk of 'early-stage investing' and 'beta tests.'
Kai-Fu's Innovation Works is the top very-early-stage fund in China. We are proud to be an investor, and hope that IW will help to produce in China companies on the scale of Facebook, Zynga, or Groupon.
I have yet to take capital losses on any company. Then again, it's still early.
Snapchat's ramp reminded us of another mobile app Benchmark had the good fortune to back at an early stage: Instagram.
Obviously, I'm at the beginning of my career, contrary to what anyone else thinks. I'm 19 years old. In any other country, everywhere else, you're a prospect. And that's what I am right now in Europe. I'm a prospect. I'm not a seasoned veteran.
It's much easier to fail when you're in the pilot, early stage, when it's less expensive and you're exploring than when you're way out the door and you've spent all this money. Industry is smart: structured to have skunkworks and pilot phases.
A recipe I've seen work in early-stage startups is a small tight-knit group of passionate people who are obsessed with their vision of how to fix a particular industry. Conversely, teams composed of people with a lot of specialized experience at running a large business are not as likely to do very well in the first year or two of a startup.
During the early stages of Zoom, I personally emailed every customer who canceled our service.
