My mother said, "Money is a great slave but a horrible master." It was her version of a French proverb.
I think it's only failure if you put the word failure on it. I think it's part of the process of learning where you're going to go and what doesn't work.
I'm not a golf player. I think golf and fishing are the same, but at the end of the day, you can't fry up and golf ball and dip it in tartar sauce. So I'm a fisherman.
Always dress to what is accurate to who and what you are.
I think the single biggest turn off is people who think that they need money and they need all these people around them so if they get the money they can just buy all the things they need to help the company... [without] hav[ing] to put in the work themselves.
I look to work with businesses that know what they are doing but need larger distribution or exposure.
Try to make all the mistakes with your own money and on a small level so that when you are responsible for a partner's money or assets you've learned and you don't make bigger mistakes. Try to go as far as you can without anybody else's help first.
As an entrepreneur, you love your business like a child, and you're taught to be laser-focused on the business.
I think a great entrepreneur is learning every day. An entrepreneur is somebody that doesn't take no for an answer - they're going to figure something out. They also take responsibility. They don't blame anybody else. And they're dreamers in one sense but they're also realistic and they take affordable steps when they can.
When you have a large amount of the workforce being laid off, some of them have no other choice but to go out there and invent something.
The thing about branding is it isn't etched in stone. A brand is a mark or an image or a perception we stamp on a product, a concept or an ideal, but it doesn't last forever. Like anything else, it needs to be nurtured and reinforced, or it will start to fade.
It is very, very hard to do that ballroom dancing and I am going to be nowhere near it. Now if you have a hot dog eating contest, call me.
In entrepreneurship, you decide to give up your day job at the point where either (A) the hobby/new business is at least making some form of ends meet, or (B) you feel that you need to dedicate yourself for a certain amount of time to it and give yourself the last hoorah.
You can make up your own opinion, but you can't make up your own facts, go sell.
Product is always king.
I'm a big advocate of financial intelligence.
Pioneers get slaughtered, and the settlers prosper.
A savvy entrepreneur will not always look for investment money, first.
If I invest in a CEO, I need him or her to have experience in sales.
The only thing that scares me in the tech area is that it moves so fast that you have to be ready to invest in 20 things. Because if you just invest in one, next week, somebody has a better mousetrap, and you get taken to the cleaners.
The perfect breakfast is fish with grits and scrambled eggs with onions. I'm getting hungry thinking about that.
In my mind, there are too many copycat web products out there that are doing the same thing.
I've come to learn that my initial investment is more about the person versus the product that I am buying into. I've also learned that I really do enjoy giving worthy people an opportunity of a lifetime.
If you can't come clean and tell investors how and why you failed, that raises a red flag. They need to see that you learned from it and came back stronger.
When looking at trends I always ask myself basic and timeless questions about business, and the one I seem to always come back to is, 'How is this different than anything else in the marketplace?'
