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.
Zuck is unemotional. He doesn't get influenced by ego.
Your job as a smart investor is to separate the facts and the news from the fiction and the noise.
You need to use data science and machine learning to get the ground truth of what's happening inside of a company.
You have to respect people for who they are on a basic level.
When I left Facebook, I left an enormous amount of equity on the table. I thought, 'I don't want to be a slave to money. I want to be a slave to something bigger: an ambition, a goal.'
When Facebook went public, they didn't have a particularly strong model of governance.
We need to go after cancer, diabetes, climate change, the substantive problems of the world that, if were solved, would create immense wealth and opportunity that would cascade across countries.
We need to divorce ourselves from venture capital as an occupation and focus on using capital as a way to take really big bets on things that just seem totally audacious.
VC has always been this high-touch, in-your-face-type business.
Valuable companies take decades to build.
There's a handful of exceptionally good companies, but there's always one company that's the best.
The government - they're completely useless.
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.
Something like bitcoin is really important because it is not correlated to the rest of the market.
One of the things I have known my entire life is that I have an innate capability for making money.
Not everybody is right all the time.
My mom was a nurse, and my dad worked in the Health Ministry as a civil servant. When I was 6 years old, my dad got a job at the Sri Lankan High Commission in Canada, so we moved there.
My first job was at a Burger King.
Much like Warren Buffett has said very famously - he doesn't buy technology stocks because he doesn't understand them- I will not buy consumer goods companies because I do not understand them.
It's important to understand the compensation equation that a CEO and a founder has with his or her employees.
If you're trying to get to profitability by lowering costs as a startup, then you are in a very precarious and difficult position.
If the government shuts down, nothing happens, and we all move on, because it just doesn't matter. Stasis in the government is actually good for all of us.
I'm a living testament to the value of immigration. I escaped a civil war, and I came to Canada as a refugee, and they gave my family protection. I did my best to pay that country back, and I think I did that.
I wish I had invested in the series A of Snapchat and Uber.
I wasn't blessed with the natural ability to rein myself in.
I was raised in a house where my mom was the primary breadwinner. It was a dysfunctional house, but she showed tremendous resilience.
I was born in Sri Lanka.
I think when you think about immigration, what we need to do is realize that that human capital, if put in a place to succeed, will literally sacrifice everything.
I think what IBM is excellent at is using their sales and marketing infrastructure to convince people who have asymmetrically less knowledge to pay for something.
