A biography for Naval Ravikanthasn’t been written yet.
“We can code wills, escrows, trusts, notaries, revokable charge backs, proof of contracts, intellectual property enforcement. What Wall Street does can be done in code by Bitcoin.”
“Rules that may be easy for Wall Street are a death sentence for startups. They are easy to break accidentally and the penalty for noncompliance is severe.”
“While the traditional banks and credit card companies lock down access to their payments infrastructure to a handful of trusted parties, Bitcoin is open to all.”
“There's so much innovation going on, and there are lots of people funding that innovation, but there's very little innovation on that infrastructure for innovation itself, so we like to do that ourselves to help companies create more tech companies.”
“At the end of the day, what makes Silicon Valley work is technology and the outcome of making money. Those two things have to be healthy. It has to matter a lot more than who is the celebrity and who is famous and who goes to the best parties.”
“I don't think I'm any smarter than any of my developers.”
“I think of Twitter as the place where I go to have a great conversation when I can't have one locally, which seems to be all the time, and the more time that I spend on Twitter, the more I sort of curate this incredible group of very intelligent people that I just get to know purely through the quality of their thoughts.”
“Our mission is to help founders and anyone or anything that helps founders helps us with our mission.”
“Think of Bitcoin as a bank account in the cloud, and it's completely decentralized: not the Swiss government, not the American government. It's all the participants in the network enforcing.”
“Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are already trustless - any machine can accept it from any other, securely. They are (nearly) free. They are global - no central bank required, and any machine can speak the language.”
“Getting in the middle of financial transactions is a regulatory minefield.”
“Startups often want to control the timing of their financing announcement and prefer not to reveal amounts raised for competitive reasons. If more of the Form D information was confidential rather than public, compliance rates would jump dramatically.”
“With tech startups, it's all loose-goosie. You raise money as you go, often from friends, family and investors.”
“Humans don't 'need' math-based cryptocurrencies when dealing with other humans. We walk slowly, talk slowly, and buy big things. Credit cards, cash, wires, checks - the world seems fine.”
“Having a million-dollar net worth doesn't make you a genius, and having less than a million-dollar net worth doesn't make you a fool.”
“If you're investing in a company in the Bitcoin economy, you have to compare the valuation of the company to the valuation of the entire economy.”
“It's probably easier and cheaper to counterfeit hundred-dollar bills than it is to counterfeit Bitcoin.”
“Cryptocurrencies will create a fifth protocol layer powering the next generation of the Internet.”
“The best founders are extremely thoughtful and have an eye for quality. I don't know if there's any generic advice here that would be helpful. Startup knowledge is a moving target.”
“One philosophy I have at AngelList is I would rather have someone working on the wrong thing and do it their way and be motivated, than working on the right thing and do it my way and not be motivated.”