The day after Donald Trump was elected, Chinese business leaders, including the heads of Baidu, stood up and gave a speech saying, 'Come to China and build your company now.' The cognitive dissonance of that was amazing for some of us to think we might be losing our leadership role in building companies.
In the earlier years of my career, I made my own attempts to fit in and be accepted as one of the tribe of Sand Hill Road guys.
The idea that there is a meritocracy where anyone from any background really might have the social and economic mobility to rise to the top in Silicon Valley, those are antithetical to a lot of the principles that the Trump administration apparently stands for.
When you see a 'Shark fight' erupt, we aggressively want to understand what we are committing our money toward.
Ride-sharing is one of the biggest math problems that's ever been approached, that's ever been attempted to be solved.
I was in the room when Sundar convinced Eric Schmidt that it would be possible to unseat Internet Explorer as the world's most popular browser.
Travis Kalanick was and is the perfect person to lead Uber, a product I knew from day one was going to be big.
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.
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.
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.
I find talented, driven, boundlessly ambitious people and help them solve problems that will hopefully improve the lives of millions. Sometimes this means investing in startup founders. Other times, it involves helping organize and fundraise for charity or politics.
Uber has an information advantage, a computational advantage. There's massive structural advantages to the player who's smartest about how to deploy cars, where to deploy cars, how to adjust pricing dynamics, how to ensure supply of drivers - the party that understands best the behavior of riders.
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.
There I was - 20 years old, living in Ireland, and I'd never heard the word 'venture capitalist.' But I'd said that I wanted a job that involved a lot of negotiation, a lot of yelling at people on the phone, and for it to be high-risk, high-reward.
Being a cheap bastard now means so much more freedom and choices later.
For most people, Twitter feels lonely.
For most people, tweeting is scary.
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.
Facebook is who you used to know; Twitter is who you want to know and things you want to know more about.
Be your unapologetically weird self.
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.
When you get into investing, your default stance should be 'No,' because most deals suck. Most deals won't make money. Most companies will fail.
There are two reasons to pursue diversity and inclusion. One, because you believe one group has benefitted from hundreds of years of discrimination, or two, maybe you don't like that women make 73 cents on the dollar compared to men.
I'm also launching a podcast. Because, I mean, the world desperately needs another podcast, am I right? Not to be a tease, but the format is different from anything else I've seen out there, and the subject matter is hopefully boundless, eye-opening, and a little cathartic.
I think there wouldn't be a Net neutrality debate in this country if we really had a competitive environment for access.
George Winston piano albums have been my go-to since junior high.
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.
One rule we have at my house is, be proud of what we invest in.
Your inbox is a to-do list to which anyone in the world can add an action item.
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.
The Internet is not pervasive as it could be, or democratic.
You can't necessarily tell when watching at home, but those pitches are usually an hour long each, and many are emotional, hilarious, and inspiring.
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.
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.
Buckminster Fuller - he never lost faith in the goodness of humanity.
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.
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.
I am retiring from startup investing. It's hard to leave all this behind right when things are going so well.
All broadcasts on Periscope need to be archived for playback permanently, unless the broadcaster chooses to delete the recording. So many treasured moments have been shared on Periscope only to vanish a day later.
You probably know me as a producer for 'This American Life', a top podcast in iTunes.
Planet colonization is not a short term concern of mine. The physical limitations of space travel render it low on the list for me.
The only way I know to be awesome at startups is to be obsessively focused and pegged to the floor of the deep end, gasping for air.
I have one of the self-driving Teslas; it drives itself periodically. It's a marvel of science, but it's still frightening. I think we've got a while before regulators and the general public wrap their heads around the path that will lead to the ubiquity of driverless cars. There's no doubt Uber will be a leader in that space.
Just don't spend your money, and you're well on your way to becoming a millionaire.
If Twitter genuinely wants users to buy things at scale, they have to give us a chance to consider the offers and make a decision in a matter of minutes/hours/days, not just seconds.
When you're fundraising for a venture fund, you're supposed to not talk.
My biggest concern is the abundance of public doubt and misunderstanding when it comes to Twitter's vision and the near future for the service.
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.
Twitter is 'Black Twitter'. That is a brand that 'Black Twitter' has given itself. That's where the hashtags happen... where the excitement is.
