Entrepreneur Quotes

“Having information that the other side doesn’t have gives [VCs] an advantage… they take advantage of entrepreneurs who haven’t been through this before… they were totally willing to take advantage of us.”

Mitch Kapor, Founder of Lotus

“Any time we would talk to another VC, [our investors] would talk him out of it: ‘This is not a good company’… So we were really stuck with [our existing investors] for the next round.”

Sabeer Bhatia, Founder of Hotmail

“Because we weren’t having success finding a CEO, [our investors] insisted that we hire these managers [a temporary CEO and CFO]. That didn’t go great.”

Tim Brady, 1st employee at Yahoo

“During the whole funding process they said, ‘We’re interested in you guys because of your management team; we think you’re fantastic…’ Two weeks later they pull me into the office – before even the first board meeting – and say, ‘We want to replace you as CEO.’”

Mark Fletcher, Founder of Bloglines

“At [SGI] board meetings… Jim [Clark’s] face would get red and he’d start shouting that [an investor and board member] had cheated him and his engineers.”

Michael Lewis on Jim Clark, the Founder of Netscape and SGI

All quotes are from Founders at Work except for the last quote which is from The New New Thing.