“Simplicity is hard to build, easy to use, and hard to charge for. Complexity is easy to build, hard to use, and easy to charge for.”
― Chris Sacca
“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.”
― Chris Sacca
“The passive acceptance of exclusionary words and deeds is not okay.”
― Chris Sacca
“American computer science grads often have very little exposure to the human condition. They’ve rarely had manual labor or service jobs. They grow up in a bubble of privilege lulled into thinking this country is a true meritocracy.”
― Chris Sacca
“Effective storytelling is the key to getting users to understand and adopt your product as well as imperative to recruiting team members and future investors.”
― Chris Sacca
“’Shark Tank’ has been a sincere joy. As our traditional venture-backed companies get bigger, the investing side tends to get more political and complicated. ‘Shark Tank’ takes me back to my early days working with ambitious founders in their earliest and scrappiest days. The show reminds me of what I deeply love about this business.”
― Chris Sacca
“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.”
― Chris Sacca
“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.”
― Chris Sacca
“In social settings, under the guise of joking, being collegial, flirting, or having a good time, I undoubtedly caused some women to question themselves, retreat, feel alone, and worry they can’t be their authentic selves.”
― Chris Sacca
“I want to make clear that my feedback comes from a place of loyalty and persistent gratitude. I love Twitter.”
― Chris Sacca
“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.”
― Chris Sacca
“Ride-sharing is one of the biggest math problems that’s ever been approached, that’s ever been attempted to be solved.”
― Chris Sacca
“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.”
― Chris Sacca
“When I first agreed to do ‘Shark Tank,’ they asked me to wear a suit, and I was just like, ‘No. I can’t. It’ll end my career.’”
― Chris Sacca
“A great idea can’t succeed without a great operator. But rarely can a great operator squeak by with a bad idea. So, as pithy as it sounds to say ‘It’s all about the people,’ I only invest when I think I have found the right team for the right business.”
― Chris Sacca
“Travis Kalanick was and is the perfect person to lead Uber, a product I knew from day one was going to be big.”
― Chris Sacca
“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.”
― Chris Sacca
“I literally should go to a Twitter therapist, just the 10 years of stress and trauma with this company.”
― Chris Sacca
“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.”
― Chris Sacca
“I want broadband to grow, more mobile devices available, particularly in underprivileged communities. I want STEM education to go ahead and fund the next generation of engineers.”
― Chris Sacca
“I wasn’t put on the Earth only to be an investor. That wasn’t my only thing in life. The problem is that as you get good at something and you keep getting better at something, more and more people just know you as that, and they have you in that box.”
― Chris Sacca
“When I was 20 years old, I was living in Ireland, going to school in Cork. There was this girl in my film class that I was kind of flirting with. We had this notebook that we passed back and forth. We would write 10 questions and then pass it back while we were supposedly paying attention.”
― Chris Sacca
“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.”
― Chris Sacca
“The United States… is the greatest nation on Earth, and I believe there are things that make us special – and one is this grand democratic experiment.”
― Chris Sacca
“There is a greed case for diversity. Diverse perspectives bring us into markets we didn’t know existed.”
― Chris Sacca
“Twitter is ‘Black Twitter’. That is a brand that ‘Black Twitter’ has given itself. That’s where the hashtags happen… where the excitement is.”
― Chris Sacca
“A deep appreciation for politics comes from empathy for our fellow human beings and their diverse paths through life.”
― Chris Sacca
“When you’re fundraising for a venture fund, you’re supposed to not talk.”
― Chris Sacca
“2009 was one of the busiest, most insane, stressful periods in my entire career. I was raising a bunch of money, buying a bunch of Twitter. I saw my friend fired as CEO of Twitter. Uber was growing like a weed. As these companies get bigger and bigger, there’s more and more friction. Being public was the last thing I wanted to do at the time.”
― Chris Sacca
“Work at a place like Google for awhile: if you do an interview and you say all the right things, no one really cares. But the day you say the wrong sentence, it’s attributed to ‘Senior Google Executive,’ and the stock moves, and everybody hates you.”
― Chris Sacca
“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.”
― Chris Sacca
“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.”
― Chris Sacca
“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.”
― Chris Sacca
“One of the things that technology has is a direct relationship with its users. We talk about newspapers. But the biggest newspapers in the world right now are Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram.”
― Chris Sacca
“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.”
― Chris Sacca
“I’ve learned that it’s often the less obvious, yet pervasive and questionable, everyday behaviors of men in our industry that collectively make it inhospitable for women.”
― Chris Sacca
“Once my ears were open to hearing mentions of ‘Shark Tank’, I was surprised by how many people in our world, even in our industry, tech and finance, loved the show.”
― Chris Sacca
“I have learned a ton about inventory, co-packing, wholesaling, end caps. All these concepts are easy to breeze by in what I do for a living or assume that there is a marketing manager or specialist in one of our companies that handles that.”
― Chris Sacca
“’Shark Tank”s participatory. There’s so many people on Twitter for this show, and they all feel like they’re in the tank, making calls on this stuff.”
― Chris Sacca
“One of my rules for investing is, I don’t invest in a deal where I don’t think I have an unfair advantage and where I don’t think I can personally impact the outcome.”
― Chris Sacca
“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.”
― Chris Sacca
“I’m good at what I do and still improving as I learn from mentors, founders, partners, friends, family, strangers, my own investors, and the experience itself.”
― Chris Sacca
“Uber is a better company with better math, better predictive supply, better brand, lower pickup times, higher quality of service. They’ll absolutely win.”
― Chris Sacca
“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.”
― Chris Sacca
“When someone comes in with a product they want in Bed Bath & Beyond, that’s way out of my comfort zone.”
― Chris Sacca
“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.”
― Chris Sacca
“I have definitely refocused Lowercase Capital on later-stage deals and my existing portfolio.”
― Chris Sacca
“It is very hip to be an angel investor now. There used to be a dozen, two dozen guys at these demo days writing checks. Now there are hundreds.”
― Chris Sacca
“Planet colonization is not a short term concern of mine. The physical limitations of space travel render it low on the list for me.”
― Chris Sacca
“The old economy with careers and benefits and pensions is gone. There are scary implications to that.”
― Chris Sacca
“Silicon Valley today is populated mostly by people who would consider themselves winners of the traditional race. This causes the exclusion of the voices that are vital to a round, robust society. It’s beyond gentrification.”
― Chris Sacca
“How can you build something for someone else if you don’t have enough familiarity with them to imagine the world through their eyes?”
― Chris Sacca
“Being a cheap bastard now means so much more freedom and choices later.”
― Chris Sacca
“There is no well-trodden route to where I am, no formula to replicate.”
― Chris Sacca
“You probably know me as a producer for ‘This American Life’, a top podcast in iTunes.”
― Chris Sacca
“Startup investing is one of my things, but it is not my everything.”
― Chris Sacca
“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.”
― Chris Sacca
“I succeeded at venture capital because, for years, I rarely thought about or spent time on anything else. Anything less than that unmitigated full commitment leaves me feeling frustrated and ineffective.”
― Chris Sacca
“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.”
― Chris Sacca
“It would be a lot cheaper for me not to have to raise tens of millions of dollars to elect progressive candidates who will raise my taxes.”
― Chris Sacca
“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.”
― Chris Sacca
“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.”
― Chris Sacca
“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.”
― Chris Sacca
“When you see a ‘Shark fight’ erupt, we aggressively want to understand what we are committing our money toward.”
― Chris Sacca
“People get out ahead of themselves in debt with spending on all of their desires. But if you learn to live pretty simply and well, well under your means, you feel incredibly, incredibly rich, and that frees you up and gives you the option to start something new, to leave the job you’re not excited about, where there might be a glass ceiling on you.”
― Chris Sacca
“Just don’t spend your money, and you’re well on your way to becoming a millionaire.”
― Chris Sacca
“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.”
― Chris Sacca
“For most people, Twitter is too hard to use.”
― Chris Sacca
“For most people, Twitter feels lonely.”
― Chris Sacca
“For most people, tweeting is scary.”
― Chris Sacca
“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.”
― Chris Sacca
“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.”
― Chris Sacca
“Live Twitter can be built right into the main Twitter app, but it should certainly have its own tab so we can concentrate on the live experience free of distraction.”
― Chris Sacca
“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.”
― Chris Sacca
“I don’t drink coffee. Weird, I know. But I try to stay away from caffeine. That said, we are investors in Blue Bottle, which is delicious!”
― Chris Sacca
“George Winston piano albums have been my go-to since junior high.”
― Chris Sacca
“Buckminster Fuller – he never lost faith in the goodness of humanity.”
― Chris Sacca
“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.”
― Chris Sacca
“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.”
― Chris Sacca
“I’ll miss working with Mark, and all of the other Sharks. Each of them has been incredibly generous and warm to me, and I am proud of all the episodes we made together.”
― Chris Sacca
“I don’t have a boss or PR person, so I’m accountable to no one.”
― Chris Sacca
“When I think about Trump and the GOP, the blood really is on their hands.”
― Chris Sacca
“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.”
― Chris Sacca
“One rule we have at my house is, be proud of what we invest in.”
― Chris Sacca
“If you follow my tweets, you know, my attention and anxiety have been increasingly focused on the plight of our democracy.”
― Chris Sacca
“I think the institutions, principles, norms, and traditions that make the United States of America genuinely exceptional are at serious risk. It has been hard to think about anything else.”
― Chris Sacca
“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.”
― Chris Sacca
“I believe there is no natural ceiling on the revenue Twitter can generate. I also believe that Twitter’s reach can become more pervasive and its impact on the world more meaningful.”
― Chris Sacca
“If Trump publicly commits to embrace science, stops threatening censorship of the Internet, rejects fake news and denounces hate against our diverse employees, only then it would make sense for tech leaders to visit Trump Tower.”
― Chris Sacca
“Make tweets effortless to enjoy, make it easier for all to participate, and make each of us on Twitter feel heard and valuable.”
― Chris Sacca
“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.”
― Chris Sacca
“Twitter can afford to build the wrong things. However, Twitter cannot afford to build the right things too slowly.”
― Chris Sacca
“I think there wouldn’t be a Net neutrality debate in this country if we really had a competitive environment for access.”
― Chris Sacca
“The Internet is not pervasive as it could be, or democratic.”
― Chris Sacca
“I am retiring from startup investing. It’s hard to leave all this behind right when things are going so well.”
― Chris Sacca
“There simply isn’t a way to do the show without investing in a bunch more companies.”
― Chris Sacca
“Facebook is who you used to know; Twitter is who you want to know and things you want to know more about.”
― Chris Sacca
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