“Amidst all the hype and hoopla around this business, I wanted to emphasize the challenge—it is seductive but the failure rate is very high. And those who fail have no good place to go.”

“Amidst all the hype and hoopla around this business, I wanted to emphasize the challenge—it is seductive but the failure rate is very high. And those who fail have no good place to go.”

“A good portfolio manager knows which companies to keep and which ones to let go. Many a GP has struggled with portfolio companies that cannot meet their value-creation milestones, or raise additional follow-on rounds of capital, or generate target returns in a time span of, say, five to seven years. The faster you recognize those losses, the better it is.”-“As David Cowan says, “Just focus on your top five—the rest is distraction.” The harder part of the investor's discipline is to know when to quit.”-“You have to constantly scan all of those things and be willing to adjust your own sense of what's a reasonable outcome and move the company into a position where it has the maximum chance to succeed. ”-“Time is your enemy: Portfolio companies always take twice as much capital and twice as long to exit. Early-stage companies rarely meet milestones as planned and always burn cash faster than anticipated.”