Customers are a great way to finance a business for many reasons. First, customer financing is typically non dilutive. They want something from you other than equity in your business. Customers also help you fit your product to the market. And customers will help debug and improve the quality of the product.

The companies that do the best job on managing a user's privacy will be the companies that ultimately are the most successful.

Games are the most social of all things on the web.

The Internet is a computing platform built on top of core technology. Applied technology is what gets built on top of that: It's Web services.

When my dad was in Vietnam, we lost a parent for a year. Thank God we didn't lose a parent for good.

All markets have boom and bust cycles, and I think venture capital market has even more exaggerated boom and bust cycles.

My venture investing career has three phases, all roughly 6-8 years long. The first, at Euclid, was software to Internet. The second, at Flatiron, was Internet to bubble. And the third, at USV, has been web 2 to mobile. I have always used a new firm to denote a new investment phase for me. Throw away the old. Start with the new.