Words matter. These are the best Bill Maris Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
All the information in the world has been pretty dispersed, but Google’s mission has been to organize it and make it universally accessible.
If you’re a technology investor, and you decide that you’re also going to be a healthcare investor or a green-tech investor, that doesn’t usually work out that well. There are reasons why people make their careers studying these things and becoming experts.
I used to be a health-care investor a long time ago in the public markets. One thing I learned that we tried to apply here is that investing in small molecules, trying to invest in the next treatment, there’s an element of gambling to that.
The reality is regulation often lags behind innovation.
I loved dinosaurs, I loved space, and I thought maybe I’d be the first paleo-astronaut.
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.
Google was a venture-funded company. Being part of that brings an energy to the company.
We are looking for highly technical, enthusiastic and capable entrepreneurs who have a healthy disregard for the impossible, and that’s not always easy to find.
Antibiotics are so pervasive that they are often prescribed preemptively, as soon as patients report symptoms, before a diagnosis is made.
People talk about the redistribution of wealth a lot, which is a very valid topic. But what about the redistribution of health? That’s even more concentrated at the top.
As computer intelligence gets better, what will be possible when we interface our brains with computers? It might sound scary, but early evidence suggests otherwise: interfacing brains with machines can be helpful in treating traumatic brain injury, repairing spinal cord damage, and countless other applications.
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.’
VC firms are… responsible for the full life cycle of a company: they find it, help it grow, open up a Rolodex, and sell it.
During the 2000 bubble, many companies rushed to go public before they had any revenue.
Government is really successful when it’s willing to make big, bold objectives, like, ‘We’re going to get to the moon.’ But without leaders with big ideas, we get stuck.
Your genome isn’t really secret.
To create exponential growth in health care, we need to put tremendous resources and focus behind the best human minds working in this field.
You make a great investment in the consumer Internet, maybe you make a lot of money and create something useful, interesting, or fun. But in life sciences, you have a chance to be part of something that lets people live longer and healthier and not lose the people they care about. That is really profound.
We actually have the tools in the life sciences to achieve anything that you have the audacity to envision. I just hope to live long enough not to die.
Organizing healthcare information is a daunting task, but it is not an impossible task. We’ve had people walk on the moon. This is a lot more doable.
We make a series of investments, some will pan out and some won’t.
There are a number of start-ups in Europe that are able to reach beyond their own country. Take Spotify – Spotify just in Sweden isn’t that interesting compared to Spotify all over the world.
Not many venture firms have people whose job is to read academic research – on startups, ventures, and entrepreneurs – and gather knowledge from that.
When you build relationships with entrepreneurs, they’re not trying to optimize on price.
We’re looking for people who are working on things that seem out of reach, uncomfortably difficult.
Healthcare is becoming part of information technology.
Big ideas we tend to like are the ones that seem impossible or crazy.
I’m not bothered when other VCs start hiring great designers or start recruiting. That’s the direction I’d like it to go.
Google Ventures has a direct financial incentive to ensure the companies we invest in succeed.
I sign off not only every investment, but every dollar that goes out the door – I’m aware of it.
