Sublime

Well, you’ve got to find fifty exceptional companies to invest in, and I invest in only one out of every hundred I look at. That means you need to look at five thousand startups over five years to place your bets—that’s twenty startups per week. That’s easily twenty to thirty hours of your life every week. If you want to be in this game, you have t

Finally, you need to email all of your founders and let them know that they don’t need permission to introduce you to other founders who are looking for investors or other investors who are looking to expand their networks. Tell them they can email you blind, without asking you first. If you are bothered by people sending you random email introduct

In some ways, “Why now?” is the most important question about the business you can ask because there are so many folks constantly trying the same ideas over and over again in our business.

Okay, there are two types of businesses in my world: insanely scalable ones and everything else. Independent films, restaurants, bars, bed-and-breakfasts, consulting firms, clothing lines, and microbreweries are—with very rare exceptions—the businesses that, no matter how hard you and the founders work on them, will not scale.

I try to choose companies based on the people running them, not the idea or market, because I’ve learned that no one can tell the future but I am an exceptional judge of talent. “I don’t need to know if your idea is going to succeed, I need to know if you are,” is a line from my blog that has been repeated over and over again.