Chris Sacca is an American venture investor, company advisor, entrepreneur, and lawyer. He is the proprietor of Lowercase Capital, a venture capital fund in the United States that has invested in seed and early-stage technology companies such as Twitter, Uber, Instagram, Twilio, and Kickstarter, investments that resulted in his placement as No. 2 on Forbes’ Midas List: Top Tech Investors for 2017. Prior to founding Lowercase Capital in 2010, Sacca held several positions at Google Inc., where he led the alternative access and wireless divisions and worked on mergers and acquisitions. Between 2015 and 2017, he appeared as a ‘Guest Shark’ on ABC’s Shark Tank. In early 2017, Sacca announced that he was retiring from venture investing. May his quotes inspire you to take action so that you may live your dreams.
1. “The very best products and the very best entrepreneurs are the ones worth arguing with.” Chris Sacca
2. “Be your unapologetically weird self.” Chris Sacca
3. “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
4. “Being cheap now means so much more freedom and choices later.” Chris Sacca
5. “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
6. “When you’re fundraising for a venture fund, you’re supposed to not talk.” Chris Sacca
7. “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
8. “You have to ask yourself, you have to be honest. Do you really have what it takes? Are you incredibly unreasonable? Do you have an irrational sense of the inevitability of the success of what you’re building, or are you just here because it’s fashionable?” Chris Sacca
9. “Good stories beat good spreadsheets.” Chris Sacca
10. “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
11. “We buy things we don’t really want with money we don’t really have to impress people we don’t really care about. Forget that.” Chris Sacca
12. “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 kinda don’t care what people think about me. I feel a lot more confident in saying what I believe.” Chris Sacca
13. “I want to be investing in the future and not the present.” Chris Sacca
14. “Startup investing is one of my things, but it is not my everything.” Chris Sacca
15. “Your value doesn’t decrease based on someone’s inability to see your worth.” Chris Sacca
16. “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
17. “Never. Stop. Selling.” Chris Sacca
18. “What’s success anyway? Is success about making the most money? No, money for the most part turns people into jerks.” Chris Sacca
19. “You have to offer value without expecting anything in return.” Chris Sacca
20. “There is a greed case for diversity. Diverse perspectives bring us into markets we didn’t know existed.” Chris Sacca
21. “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
22. “Ride-sharing is one of the biggest math problems that’s ever been approached, that’s ever been attempted to be solved.” Chris Sacca
23. “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
24. “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
25. “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
26. “When you see a ‘Shark fight’ erupt, we aggressively want to understand what we are committing our money toward.” Chris Sacca
27. “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
28. “One rule we have at my house is, be proud of what we invest in.” Chris Sacca
29. “Just don’t spend your money, and you’re well on your way to becoming a millionaire.” Chris Sacca
30. “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
31. “Don’t talk stats and charts. Attach what you’re doing to a narrative about a problem you’re solving.” Chris Sacca
32. “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
33. “The biggest journey in all of our lives is the journey from external to internal validation.” Chris Sacca
34. “What happens next is up to you.” Chris Sacca
35. “Ideas are cheap. Execution is everything.” Chris Sacca
