In the past, there hasn't been much reliable information about startups and small businesses available online. It's information that's really valuable, and it's information that people want to share.
Adam D'Angelo
What's really happening is that every bank in the country is experimenting with the blockchain and experimenting with bitcoin to figure out where the value is. For the first time ever, they're working hand in hand with startups. Banks are asking startups for help to build products.
Adam Draper
You want people who choose to follow because they genuinely believe in ideas, not because they're afraid to be punished if they don't. For startups, there's so much pivoting that's required that if you have a bunch of sheep, you're in bad shape.
Adam Grant
Seed stage is an investment area that is really important for early stage startups. It feels like there is a need for trusted, experienced people to work with and to guide startups at this level.
Aileen Lee
Having been a venture-backed CEO, and having an established background in working with consumer-focused companies, I've built a strong network of entrepreneurs and people who can help startups.
I played with different words like 'home run,' 'megahit,' and they just all sounded kind of 'blah.' So I put in 'unicorn' because they are - these are very rare companies in the sense that there are thousands of startups in tech every year, and only a handful will wind up becoming a unicorn company. They're really rare.
I'm probably most proud of the fact that we are bootstrapped and that we are able to do not just the typical Silicon Valley startup thing. We are basically throwing away all the typical conventions of other startups.
Alan Schaaf
In Europe, there is a lower instance of startups because there's a permanent fear of failure. Everyone fears failure because it is this permanent black mark against your name, whereas in the U.S., failure seems to be par for the course.
Alexander Gilkes
In Silicon Valley, there are a lot of startups using computer vision for agriculture or shopping - there are a lot for clothes shopping. At Baidu, for example, if you find a picture of a movie star, we actually use facial recognition to identify that movie star and then tell you things like their age and hobbies.
Andrew Ng
There are two companies that the AI Fund has invested in - Woebot and Landing AI - and the AI Fund has a number of internal teams working on new projects. We usually bring in people as employees, work with them to turn ideas into startups, then have the entrepreneurs go into the startup as founders.
I think the Indian AI ecosystem is growing rapidly. A lot of Indian entrepreneurs reach out to me seeking feedback about startups and products. And some of them have very interesting business ideas.
I think the rise of A.I. is bigger than the rise of mobile. Large companies are sometimes as worried about startups as startups are about large companies. Ultimately, it will be about who delivers the best service or product.
Baidu and Google are great companies, but there are a lot of things you can do outside them. Just as electricity and the Internet transformed the world, I think the rise of modern A.I. technology will create a lot of opportunities both for new startups and for incumbent companies to transform.
The problems that you see startups tackling are dramatically different in different cities. Silicon Valley is unlikely to produce the same set of companies as New York or Cleveland because the region has a different set of strengths and defining institutions.
Andrew Yang
You can fake a lot in a startup these days, what with Amazon Web Services and all sorts of off-the-shelf back-end components that let any even minimally competent duffer set up a Web app that does something. Intelligent planning for growth is rare among early startups, but it's the name of the game at a large, rapidly scaling tech company.
Antonio Garcia Martinez
I think Yandex is something in between two different cultures. One originated from the old Soviet culture of the scientific institute. It was a free atmosphere of scientists, maybe too free because nobody cared about making money. Another origin is something close to what you usually see in California startups.
Arkady Volozh
We are seeing a new wave of young biologists that are attacking old problems with new tools and fresh ideas, leading to new types of bio startups and creating a much-needed engine to drive Silicon Valley into the next century.
Arvind Gupta
There is a glass ceiling for the Indian startups. If I want to meet the PM, it won't be as easy as a foreign guy coming to India. I understand that dynamic, and we need to make sure government sees us as major contributors to society, which is not full there.
Bhavish Aggarwal
It's much easier for non-Indian companies to raise capital because they have profitable markets elsewhere. You might call it capital dumping, predatory pricing, or anti-WTO, but it's a very unfair playing field for Indian startups.
I have a particular relationship with Vinod Khosla because he's got a lot of very interesting science-based energy startups.
Bill Gates
Not many venture firms have people whose job is to read academic research - on startups, ventures, and entrepreneurs - and gather knowledge from that.
Doing startups is all about making mistakes.
I would describe Hyperledger as a tremendous opportunity for collaboration for firms that range from gigantic commercial concerns all the way to the smallest, newest startups. It's a community of great intellectual depth and great commercial breadth, and as such, I think the opportunity to be part of that is a unique and enriching experience.
Life inside successful Web startups - especially the really successful ones - can be nasty, brutish, and short. As companies grow exponentially, egos clash, investors jockey for control, and business complexities rapidly exceed the managerial abilities of the founders.
It's a lot easier to gain traction when there is such a great proliferation of Internet access. The velocity at which some of these startups are gaining traction is mind-boggling. Companies like ShoeDazzle, Stella & Dot, Gilt, Groupon - these companies are going from zero to hundreds of millions in revenue in three years.
Don't let a lack of big company names on your resume get you down, but also, don't let it feed a Silicon Valley ego. Oftentimes, the best candidates come from startups or smaller companies. It shows they are open to risk and can keep up with the long hours and occasional harsh demands.
It's often lost in most Silicon Valley startups, the importance of storytelling when most people are thinking about they assemble their team and the critical functions that the team needs to be successful. Storytelling is normally not on the list.
Before Blockchain Capital, I was cranking out startups like an incubator.
Startups were thriving in Los Angeles when Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard were closer to the nursery than they were the garage.
Startups should be - if you graph their financial performance, it should be what's called a J curve. You start out at zero. you're not making any money; you're not losing any money.
When people say they can't find African-American startups to invest in, it just sounds a little crazy to me.
The reason why we decided to put the focus on minority and women-funded startups is because this demographic of companies and founders is just underrepresented, they're under-invested in.
Sometimes, the startup game works in your favor just because you got in at the right time and right environment. Other times, you're a little too late entering an already crowded space. But startups with strong fundamentals withstand external conditions and come out ahead in good or bad times.
The only way I know to be awesome at startups is to be obsessively focused and pegged to the floor of the deep end, gasping for air.
I was always really interested in startups and fascinated by what they were working on.
There's a lot of glorification of startups and being a founder. People brush the failures under the rug, but that's the worst thing you can do. You kind of have to face it head on.
When startups succeed, they do so against all odds. In the beginning, you have nothing except for your own talents and resources. By definition, everyone else is bigger, further along, and more established than you. To win, you have to swim upstream early on - and that requires hard work and long hours. There are no shortcuts.
In the startup work environment, you get to have a relationship with your boss, the investors, and the key members of the team. Startups are like families - you see the good, the bad and the ugly, but in the end, you've got each other's back.
Because most startups are lean and scrappy organizations consisting of a limited number of people and supported by an even smaller number of resources, startups cannot afford to have any slackers on board. When you fail, you cause an 'epic failure,' and when you win, everyone in the company knows about it.
I think that sometimes people talk about disruption, and I've seen tons of startups come in as disruptors and then disappear. And I think what we need to do as an industry is think about a world that is dominated by mobile and software and not extrapolate from what was. And I think a lot of big companies tend to want to do that.
Most startups flame out or just muddle along. Your chances of spotting a unicorn, pre-horn, are incalculably small. But if, knowing that, you still want to toss aside your cushy job, at least listen to corporate vets who have made the transition.
My prior stint at 'Newsweek' was a very different world. So it's what it's like to be in one of these kooky software startups as a grown up. It's not entirely pleasant! It's like, 'Oh, I don't fit.'
If we didn't have Net neutrality, carriers could do things like penalize companies that use a lot of bandwidth or create high-speed lanes and charge Internet companies extra fees to send their stuff over them. That would give an advantage to big companies and make life harder for startups.
I aim to combine all the things I do in a comprehensive and holistic fashion that benefits startups and the people who make them grow.
'Bazillion Dollar Club' follows six struggling startups trying to get their products together.
If I had a do over, I'd indubitably start investing in startups earlier in life!
My attitude is there are at least hundreds of interesting startups that are going to get going in every year.
We believe that startups can be built anywhere.
Company naming is a key part of the branding process, but it's subject to contrasting tastes and an illiquid domain name market that results in startups wasting their time during the branding process.
Quality and a great product matters, in startups, and in accelerators.
