Chris Sacca
Travis Kalanick was and is the perfect person to lead Uber, a product I knew from day one was going to be big.
Effective storytelling is the key to getting users to understand and adopt your product as well as imperative to recruiting team members and future investors.
'Shark Tank' has been a sincere joy. As our traditional venture-backed companies get bigger, the investing side tends to get more political and complicated. 'Shark Tank' takes me back to my early days working with ambitious founders in their earliest and scrappiest days. The show reminds me of what I deeply love about this business.
I've definitely sold some Twitter shares. I don't own as many as I used to, because I'm not an idiot, but I own more than I should because I'm an idiot.
I literally should go to a Twitter therapist, just the 10 years of stress and trauma with this company.
They are desperate for surrogates to get behind Trump, and they can't find anyone who has actually had genuine success who is willing to stand behind him. That is because he is all smoke and mirrors. We know he doesn't have all the money he claims he has.
I want broadband to grow, more mobile devices available, particularly in underprivileged communities. I want STEM education to go ahead and fund the next generation of engineers.
I wasn't put on the Earth only to be an investor. That wasn't my only thing in life. The problem is that as you get good at something and you keep getting better at something, more and more people just know you as that, and they have you in that box.
When I was 20 years old, I was living in Ireland, going to school in Cork. There was this girl in my film class that I was kind of flirting with. We had this notebook that we passed back and forth. We would write 10 questions and then pass it back while we were supposedly paying attention.
The United States... is the greatest nation on Earth, and I believe there are things that make us special - and one is this grand democratic experiment.
When I posted the 8,500 words on what Twitter should be, I wanted to make clear this wasn't a vision statement for the future. What was so frustrating about it is that's what it should've been already.
There is a greed case for diversity. Diverse perspectives bring us into markets we didn't know existed.
Twitter is 'Black Twitter'. That is a brand that 'Black Twitter' has given itself. That's where the hashtags happen... where the excitement is.
A deep appreciation for politics comes from empathy for our fellow human beings and their diverse paths through life.
When you're fundraising for a venture fund, you're supposed to not talk.
2009 was one of the busiest, most insane, stressful periods in my entire career. I was raising a bunch of money, buying a bunch of Twitter. I saw my friend fired as CEO of Twitter. Uber was growing like a weed. As these companies get bigger and bigger, there's more and more friction. Being public was the last thing I wanted to do at the time.
I spent a lot of time learning how to define myself internally rather than externally. I learned how to care less about external validation. I think that's given me a renewed confidence in speaking out loud. I kind of don't care what people think about me. I feel a lot more confident in saying what I believe.
Work at a place like Google for awhile: if you do an interview and you say all the right things, no one really cares. But the day you say the wrong sentence, it's attributed to 'Senior Google Executive,' and the stock moves, and everybody hates you.
I think our election proved to us that 'billionaire' is an incredibly magical word in our language in that people just defer to it. Donald Trump is not a billionaire, but he knew it was vital for him to be perceived as one.
I've yet to see an example of somebody standing up to Donald Trump and suggesting policy initiatives and him embracing them yet. It's not happening at scale.
One of the things that technology has is a direct relationship with its users. We talk about newspapers. But the biggest newspapers in the world right now are Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram.
In social settings, under the guise of joking, being collegial, flirting, or having a good time, I undoubtedly caused some women to question themselves, retreat, feel alone, and worry they can't be their authentic selves.
I've learned that it's often the less obvious, yet pervasive and questionable, everyday behaviors of men in our industry that collectively make it inhospitable for women.
Shark Tank's participatory. There's so many people on Twitter for this show, and they all feel like they're in the tank, making calls on this stuff.
One of my rules for investing is, I don't invest in a deal where I don't think I have an unfair advantage and where I don't think I can personally impact the outcome.
The better I get at investing in and helping companies, the result is more founders who are excited to work with me and more of my wonderful limited partners insisting I take piles of their loot to keep it all going.
I'm good at what I do and still improving as I learn from mentors, founders, partners, friends, family, strangers, my own investors, and the experience itself.
Uber is a better company with better math, better predictive supply, better brand, lower pickup times, higher quality of service. They'll absolutely win.
I really do see the sharks evolving their perspective. In the early days of the show, if you brough them an app, they would've turned their noses up. But now they know how indispensable those apps are, even to their own traditional businesses.
When someone comes in with a product they want in Bed Bath & Beyond, that's way out of my comfort zone.
I may be the only shark who hasn't been on QVC, but I have learned a lot from those folks about what it takes to get a product on store shelves.
I have definitely refocused Lowercase Capital on later-stage deals and my existing portfolio.
It is very hip to be an angel investor now. There used to be a dozen, two dozen guys at these demo days writing checks. Now there are hundreds.
The old economy with careers and benefits and pensions is gone. There are scary implications to that.
Silicon Valley today is populated mostly by people who would consider themselves winners of the traditional race. This causes the exclusion of the voices that are vital to a round, robust society. It's beyond gentrification.
How can you build something for someone else if you don't have enough familiarity with them to imagine the world through their eyes?
Being a cheap bastard now means so much more freedom and choices later.
There is no well-trodden route to where I am, no formula to replicate.
You probably know me as a producer for 'This American Life', a top podcast in iTunes.
Startup investing is one of my things, but it is not my everything.
I succeeded at venture capital because, for years, I rarely thought about or spent time on anything else. Anything less than that unmitigated full commitment leaves me feeling frustrated and ineffective.
Funny enough, the person who is most bummed out to hear I won't be back is Mark Cuban. Despite what you might surmise from on screen, he and I are actually good friends - just really competitive good friends.
It would be a lot cheaper for me not to have to raise tens of millions of dollars to elect progressive candidates who will raise my taxes.
The Sharks step right on each other's questions, and if I ever did that in Silicon Valley, I would be considered a pariah. I literally had to learn how to interrupt.
I had a blast. 'Shark Tank' embodies the American Dream. If you watch the show at home, you find yourself constantly hollering at the Sharks. Being able to sit next to them and call them out in real time was quite a privilege.
One of the things that struck me is how authentic 'Shark Tank' is. I don't know how more real it can be. You have no prior knowledge about the entrepreneurs.
What happens next is up to you.Collection: Entrepreneur
What is success anyway? Is success about making the most money? No. Money, for the most part, turns people into jerks.Collection: People
Twitter is more a cultural than a technological change.Collection: Technological Change