What would I advise an aspiring young entrepreneur? Certainly I’d say read the works of great entrepreneurs and investors like Ben Horowitz, Peter Thiel, and many others. But what’s more important is to get real experience at a great startup.
Profits are one of the most important goals of any successful business, and investors are one of the most important constituencies of public businesses.
The quality and quantum of potential investors in Africa is huge.
Community interest companies are a growing form of regulated social enterprises, and we want to make sure that the rules are as friendly as possible for investors and social enterprises.
The only reason investors haven’t run screaming from an obviously corrupt financial marketplace is because the government has gone to such extraordinary lengths to sell the narrative that the problems of 2008 have been fixed.
Learn to invest in investments where you can achieve an honest, legal advantage over other investors. When it comes to investing, why play on a level field?
The company has been clear from the start that we try to serve customers long-term, and long-term investors are going to be more excited about Amazon than short-term investors.
I am obsessed with delivering value to investors and winning the game from a personal standpoint.
Having billions of dollars immediately available to plug budget holes without raising taxes is very appealing. And to the delight of Wall Street investors, state and local governments often fail to ask the important questions or consider the long-term impact.
Investors have to ask themselves two questions. How much can we grow our investments? And, can we afford our mistakes?
The JOBS Act will allow entrepreneurs to utilize ‘crowdfunding,’ which permits them to raise equity capital from a large pool of small investors.
The financial crisis of 2008 was not caused by investment banks betting against the housing market in 2007. It was caused by the fact that too few investors – including all of the big investment banks – bet too heavily on the housing market in the years before 2007.
We would like a stable policy framework, and whatever incentives and tax structures are there should be made known to investors upfront. There should be credibility, clarity and continuity in both policy formulation and its implementation.
The need for empowering investors to have information on the way their own money is invested is not going away.
Fannie Mae has traditionally only bought and sold mortgages. But when a loan held by the company goes into foreclosure, Fannie Mae gains ownership of the underlying property until it is resold to new investors.
Investors have few spare tires left. Think of the image of a car on a bumpy road to an uncertain destination that has already used up its spare tire. The cash reserves of people have been eaten up by the recent market volatility.
In order to access private capital, you have to provide competitive return on investment. In order to give competitive returns to investors, you’ve got to operate on a profitable basis and be thinking of yourself as a business.
New products, new markets, new investors, and new ways of doing things are the lifeblood of growth. And while each innovation carries potential risk, businesses that don’t innovate will eventually diminish.
The strength of the dollar has historically been tied to the strength of the U.S. economy and the faith that investors have in doing business in America.
The kind of investors we seek are long term because that’s how we make our decisions.
So much of what happened to India late last year and early into 2011 is the same story we’ve seen with other big emerging markets, and that is that investors started to realize that the growth trajectory in India would have to get moderated by tightening policy.
Entrepreneurs or international conglomerateurs, or large financial institutions buy or create mutual fund management companies to create a return on their own capital. It’s capitalism at work, where the rewards tend to go to the managers rather than the investors.
All you need do is listen to very smart people and sift out the ideas that are unworthy or implausible, and I wouldn’t pretend for a moment that I hadn’t made lots of mistakes and there are companies, perhaps, that we had been investors in.
Many novice real estate investors soon quit the profession and invest in a well-diversified portfolio of bonds. That’s because, when you invest in real estate, you often see a side of humanity that stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and saving money shelter you from.
But successful investors tend to be not too self-destructive. They tend to be patient, they tend not to follow the crowd, and they tend not to be too guilty about winning.
Simply put, investors should own less equities, more bonds, more global investments, more cash and more dry ammunition.
If you don’t have savings, and your co-founders are as poor as you are, and if Mom and Dad won’t loan you money, then your best bet is to find people that know you – your friends. If they, too, won’t help, then you’re stuck seeking out angel investors.
If I bring to light a company that’s poisoning customers, defrauding investors, or something like that… there just aren’t enough regulators in the world to keep up with all of the fraud and malfeasance that goes on out there, particularly in the little nooks and crannies of the market.
The investors who generate big returns over five years, the guys they write books about, are supposed to keep winning, right? Well, they don’t.
Private equity investors are an integral part of the economy and should be celebrated for making our country wealthier.
The usual reason companies are funded or valued on the stock market for not having a current profit is because the investors believe there will be a future profit.
My investors expect me to maximize profits.
Great investors need to have the right combination of intuition, business sense and investment talent.
Investors are always biased to invest in things they themselves understand. So venture capitalists like Uber because they like driving in black town cars. They don’t like Airbnb because they like staying in five-star hotels, not sleeping on people’s couches.
The grim irony of investing is that we investors as a group not only don’t get what we pay for, we get precisely what we don’t pay for.
I think investors ought to focus on making sure that the stock is within their circle of competence, that it’s worth a lot more than it’s valued at – and once you have those two things, a stop-loss makes no sense.
Even Silicon Valley investors have put well over a $1 billion in new energy technologies.
The only way for me to be an artist is to be honest in my craft. If I veer from that, I’m not giving the investors what they want. Sometimes it’s my job as an artist to know what I want to do, even when the fans tell me different.
The role of a founder-CEO is extremely lonely. You can’t always be fully forthcoming with your board or investors or employees.
One of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make is not understanding the relationship they have with their investors. At times, they confuse VCs with their friends.
As long as you’ve got serious investors who wish to put money into football, I applaud. It proves that football is attractive. What upsets me, what I find scandalous, is when clubs accept fools.
Many investors understandably want to do good while also doing well. But the standards for ESG investing are often unclear and sometimes contradictory.
Instead of mindlessly tossing billions at or taking billions from the Net as such, investors should be spending their time making sure that it’s the future Fords and General Motors of cyberspace that are getting the capital they need.
When it comes to valuation, there’s only one thing stock investors really care about, which is earnings.
Stock exchanges say that more than half of all trades are now executed by just a handful of high-frequency traders, who use rapid-fire computers to essentially force slower investors to give up profits, then disappear before anyone knows what happened.
Being in a band is very much like a startup. You start in a garage. You hope to get interest from investors, like a major record label.
There is a significant momentum behind the social Internet. A wide range of public investors were very enthusiastic about that.
‘Ick investing’ means taking a special analytical interest in stocks that inspire a first reaction of ‘ick.’ I tend to become interested in stocks that by their very names or circumstances inspire unwillingness – and an ‘ick’ accompanied by a wrinkle of the nose on the part of most investors to delve any further.
If you’re constantly making business decisions on behalf of your investors first, ultimately you’re going to wear down your other stakeholders. It’s going to be potentially hurtful for your employees and your customers and the community you do business with.
We want to clean up South Africa so that we can begin to make it more attractive to investors but at the same time to deal with the issues that are impeding growth.
I am not an oligarch. I am a servant and I try to align my interests and those of my investors.
Understand that VCs are simply a sophisticated form of financial investors who, in turn, need to satisfy their own investors.
