Top 50 Fred Wilson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “A person who is quietly confident makes the best leader.”

— Fred Wilson

Featured in: Leadership Quotes, Thursday Inspirational Quotes

2. “If you want to create something great and do it faster than the competition, you need to be action oriented.”

— Fred Wilson

3. “To see things differently requires you to be wired a little differently.”

— Fred Wilson

4. “Given New York City’s cultural diversity, it has always attracted creative people.”

— Fred Wilson

Featured in: Quotes About New York

5. “Ideas that most people derided as ridiculous have produced the best outcomes. Don’t do the obvious thing.”

— Fred Wilson

6. “Not only do you have to put yourself in harms way in service of your country, you have to leave your families at home. It is a great sacrifice.”

— Fred Wilson

7. “People already love to play casual games. But when you take a casual game and stick it inside a social network, it becomes way more exciting.”

— Fred Wilson

8. “Investing in management means building communication systems, business processes, feedback, and routines that let you scale the business and team as efficiently as possible.”

— Fred Wilson

9. “Early in a startup, product decisions should be hunch driven. Later on, product decisions should be data driven.”

— Fred Wilson

10. “Don’t try to solve the entire problem on day one.”

— Fred Wilson

11. “I think ‘crazy’ is a compliment. I think you make money with people who are crazy.”

— Fred Wilson

12. “Money is information, like bits.”

— Fred Wilson

13. “Markets come and go. Good business don’t.”

— Fred Wilson

14. “Being an entrepreneur is hard. Having supportive and caring investors helps.”

— Fred Wilson

15. “I don’t like to talk about myself. I like to talk about stuff that’s happening, stuff that’s going to happen, and the people who are going to make it happen.”

— Fred Wilson

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

— Fred Wilson

17. “I’m really interested in the intersection between reputation, identity, and knowledge.”

— Fred Wilson

18. “There is a difference between hiring a CEO and turning over control of the business.”

— Fred Wilson

19. “When I see people laughing at ideas and companies we have backed, I smile. It means we are going to make a lot of money on that investment.”

— Fred Wilson

20. “If you have an idea that you can’t get out of your head, do a startup. Otherwise join a startup.”

— Fred Wilson

21. “The fact is that the amount of money startups raise in their seed and Series A rounds is inversely correlated with success.”

— Fred Wilson

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

— Fred Wilson

23. “Marketing is for companies who have sucky products.”

— Fred Wilson

24. “Board meetings should not be for the benefit of the board. They should be for the benefit of the CEO and the senior team.”

— Fred Wilson

25. “Not acknowledging that beauty is complex-that’s the problem. I enjoy making it complex for people, because that’s my world.”

— Fred Wilson

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

— Fred Wilson

27. “It’s not easy for an entrepreneur to find the time to blog. But for those who do it, it is a great tool to communicate with the various stakeholders in their business and build a reputation for thought leadership.”

— Fred Wilson

28. “I use beauty as a way of helping people to receive difficult or upsetting ideas. The topical issues are merely a vehicle for making one aware of one’s own perceptual shift-which is the real thrill.”

— Fred Wilson

29. “The entire world is now a rival to Silicon Valley. No country, state, region, nor city has a lock on innovation in technology anymore.”

— Fred Wilson

30. “Many artists stick to making and hire a manager to focus on their business. Artists that build websites and mobile apps can do that, too.”

— Fred Wilson

31. “I get everything that satisfies my soul from bringing together objects that are in the world, manipulating them, working with spatial arrangements, and having things presented in the way I want to see them.”

— Fred Wilson

32. “Profiles aren’t journalism.”

— Fred Wilson

33. “Equity capital is expensive. Every time you do a raise, you dilute.”

— Fred Wilson

34. “If you have a native monetization system where the atomic unit of content is the ad unit, that scales down all the way to a small screen experience. That’s why Twitter is performing so well on mobile.”

— Fred Wilson

35. “If you want to unleash more creativity in your company, you need to allow for a little contamination. It is the sand in the oyster that creates the pearl.”

— Fred Wilson

36. “Venture capitalists are professional money managers. We are provided capital to invest as long as we can return it to our investors with a strong return in a reasonable amount of time. A strong return is three times cash on cash. A reasonable amount of time is ten years max.”

— Fred Wilson

37. “Facebook is not an unstoppable juggernaut. There are a lot of other things people can do on the web.”

— Fred Wilson

38. “I would like to reiterate that I don’t want any profiles of me. I am not newsworthy.”

— Fred Wilson

39. “I believe Android will be stronger in the developing world than it is in the developed world.”

— Fred Wilson

40. “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.”

— Fred Wilson

41. “I believe the mobile OS market will play out very similarly to Windows and Macintosh, with Android in the role of Windows. And so if you want to be in front of the largest number of users, you need to be on Android.”

— Fred Wilson

42. “Skyping with your spouse works well enough, but apparently it is hard to get the kids to hang out on Skype for long.”

— Fred Wilson

43. “Blog-based businesses have lower cost structures and are more ‘authentic,’ and as a result are drawing larger shares of ad budgets.”

— Fred Wilson

44. “I’m a free speech bigot. I don’t like censorship; I just don’t think it’s a good thing.”

— Fred Wilson

45. “Most adults I know start their Internet session at Google, and most kids I know start their Internet session at either Facebook or MySpace.”

— Fred Wilson

46. “The more entrepreneurs in the world that are getting their ideas financed, the more great companies there are going to be that we can all invest in.”

— Fred Wilson

47. “There are so many startups out there raising money. I don’t think this is a bad thing. It’s a good thing. Entrepreneurship is in vogue. Innovators are innovating. Makers are making.”

— Fred Wilson

48. “It’s upsetting to me that you have to be a millionaire to invest in your friend’s start-up.”

— Fred Wilson

49. “Games are the most social of all things on the web.”

— Fred Wilson

50. “Startups are rapidly changing systems. If you use an annual review cycle, you aren’t getting feedback at the same pace that you need to adapt and change the business.”

— Fred Wilson