The best early-stage venture capital investments appear obvious in retrospect; however, very few of them are actually obvious when you make them.
David Sze
For us, whether the market is skewed from a bubble perspective or not really is mitigated by staying focused on what we do best.
I think there are a lot of companies that are staying private longer. Much more of their growth is happening while they are on the private side. So their valuations are hitting $1 billion while they are still private more often.
The story of Google is just when everyone concluded that a search engine would never make any money, everyone backed out of it, and Google walked into that vacuum and dominated.
We listen to the entrepreneur. We try to have a fine tuning fork to understand what they are saying and whether that makes sense and know it when we see it. We don't try to do too much predicting.
I think that it will be the mobile technologies, both from the enterprise and the consumer side, where super unicorns will come from. I still believe that social networking in combination with mobile will create opportunities for super unicorns.
When you rest on your laurels is right when you have the risk. It exists for every company, no matter how big.
One of the things I like about the Internet is it does force us to realize we're all humans, and it forces us to look at the pattern of people, not one moment.
There's a final exam in venture every four to six years. The scary thing is you need to get an 'A' in every discipline. You need to be on generational planning, need to be on great deal flow, need be on great outcomes, you need to be on great company building.
Founded in August 2003, MySpace would go on to be the most-visited social networking site in the world from 2005 until early 2008.
The most important thing for us is investing and making companies great, and then they have all the options they want, whether that's to go public or stay private.
I think that the most important thing we look for in partners is that they can help build companies and, you know, we have the - we have the opportunity to do that at different stages.
When I started in the business in 1999 and 2000, we had companies that were going public in two, three or four years.
A lot of great people come to Facebook. In our business, we're about how do we help connect our companies to great people across all levels.
The best opportunities are often ones where you're being contrarian. That doesn't mean being contrarian for contrarian's sake, but it means you're thoughtful about the risks of following the crowd.
We reviewed our process at Greylock and discovered that the best investments are non-obvious enough that they result in a mixed vote by our partnership.
Every social network on Earth pitches me, and I say no to nearly every single one of them.
College is a magic time. Yes, you're young and fickle, but you want to be part of this college experience... Then you graduate from that. You have your first job, moving to a new city.
