Bill Maris

“Your genome isn't really secret.”

“Humans are terrible at predicting the future. We really overestimate what we can do in the short term and underestimate what we can do in the long term... If we can glimpse even a couple of years into the future, even that's difficult to do.”

“People talk about the redistribution of wealth a lot, which is a very valid topic. But what about the redistribution of health? That's even more concentrated at the top.”

“We can get much better outcomes from people if we understand the genetic basis of the exact cancer that they have, what interventions might be most effective against it, what's worked in the past and what hasn't.”

“Say you have cancer - you have this broad thing we call cancer; we're going to irradiate you and pump this poisonous material into you and hope more of the bad stuff dies than the good. That is going to seem so medieval when we can fix it on a genetic level, and Foundation Medicine is the first step to diagnosing it on a genetic level.”

“I contemplated a career at NIH at one point. I have a neuroscience background.”

“The reality is regulation often lags behind innovation.”

“You make a great investment in the consumer Internet, maybe you make a lot of money and create something useful, interesting, or fun. But in life sciences, you have a chance to be part of something that lets people live longer and healthier and not lose the people they care about. That is really profound.”

“If I were to leave and raise a venture fund, I would have to find 10 or 100 LPs. They would all give me a bunch of money, and I would take a percentage of that to pay myself. They would expect me to invest that over the next three years, and they want that money back in seven or eight years.”

“If I'm an entrepreneur, and I have a term sheet from Sequoia and Kleiner, that's the safe choice. Google Ventures is the brave choice.”

“To create exponential growth in health care, we need to put tremendous resources and focus behind the best human minds working in this field.”

“I can make it very clear: I get paid if we make good investments. And if we don't, I don't get paid. I have no incentive to sell our companies to Google; the entrepreneurs get to decide that. We are minority shareholders.”

“Google was a venture-funded company. Being part of that brings an energy to the company.”

“We make a series of investments, some will pan out and some won't.”

“If you're a technology investor, and you decide that you're also going to be a healthcare investor or a green-tech investor, that doesn't usually work out that well. There are reasons why people make their careers studying these things and becoming experts.”

“When you apply computer science and machine learning to areas that haven't had any innovation in 50 years, you can make rapid advances that seem really incredible.”

“Organizing healthcare information is a daunting task, but it is not an impossible task. We've had people walk on the moon. This is a lot more doable.”

“Silicon Valley has been a technology capital like New York is a financial capital.”

“With a regular venture fund, you raise, let's say, a billion dollars, and then over the next three or four years, you've got to invest that money; otherwise, the people who invested with you will say, 'What are you doing? You're just collecting fees on our money.'”

“Big ideas we tend to like are the ones that seem impossible or crazy.”