The first rule of venture capitalism is hands-on experience. You have to get your hands dirty.
The willingness to fail gives us the freedom to succeed.
Every big problem is a big opportunity.
If you’re going to re-invent healthcare you have to start from scratch.
Screw up often; but screw up ahead of everybody else, and than learn as much, and than use it to make subsequent investments.
It is important in any population to have an ecosystem around start-up ideas to leverage the most out of them such an ecosystem needs developing and most of this is about giving entrepreneurs confidence.
You have to invent the future you want.
The only way you multiply resources is with technology. To really affect poverty, energy, health, education, or anything else – there is no other way.
You need a degree of foolishness to cause disruptive change in healthcare. Dare to dream.
I do not know what got me interested in technology. What was very clear to me very early on was that I was not interested in religion and that naturally increased my curiosity about science and technology, and I fundamentally believe the two are conflicting.
Everybody else is afraid to fail. I do not really care because when I fail, I try something new.
Where most entrepreneurs fail is on the things they don’t know they don’t know.
Maybe some percentage that’s substantially larger than 95 percent of VCs add zero value. I would bet that 70-80 percent add negative value to a startup in their advising.
I generally disagree with most of the very high margin opportunities. Why? Because it’s a business strategy tradeoff: the lower the margin you take, the faster you grow.
Climate deniers are clearly the fringe group and need to see a proctologist to find their heads.
No one will pay you to solve a non-problem.
I believe cellulosic fuels, biofuels made from nonfood crops are the only solution that will make a difference.
The world is hung up on food-based biofuels. Not only are they the wrong thing, they’re the uneconomic thing.
We don’t need a fuel that’s cleaner, we need a fuel that happens to be cleaner, but is half the price of oil.
There’s no doubt in my mind over the next 25 years how we drive, how we build our houses, how we fly, how we build our buildings, will all change.
As for companies invested in the space – I think its important to distinguish between a good investment and a material climate change technology – you can have the first without the second, even in the “clean tech” space.