Zitat des Tages von Bill Maris:
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.
Google Ventures has a direct financial incentive to ensure the companies we invest in succeed.
The reality is regulation often lags behind innovation.
I used to be a health-care investor a long time ago in the public markets. One thing I learned that we tried to apply here is that investing in small molecules, trying to invest in the next treatment, there's an element of gambling to that.
To create exponential growth in health care, we need to put tremendous resources and focus behind the best human minds working in this field.
There are environmental threats to health; there are internal threats to health - genetic conditions, viral threats, diseases like cancer and Parkinson's. And then there are societal and global ones, like poverty and lack of nutrition. And unknown viral threats - everything from a new kind of influenza to hemorrhagic fever.
Healthcare is becoming part of information technology.
Your genome isn't really secret.
If you want to invest in early-stage technologies, putting a timeframe on it does behold you to Silicon Valley economics. You've got a certain time period where you have to make the money. And you have to invest that money whether you find good companies or not.
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.
Not many venture firms have people whose job is to read academic research - on startups, ventures, and entrepreneurs - and gather knowledge from that.
In genomics, there's a massive amount of information in which you can look for patterns and develop insights.
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.
Google was a venture-funded company. Being part of that brings an energy to the company.
When you build relationships with entrepreneurs, they're not trying to optimize on price.
Big ideas we tend to like are the ones that seem impossible or crazy.
You want to work with people you are excited about and they are excited about you. It's a two-way street.
I contemplated a career at NIH at one point. I have a neuroscience background.
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.
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.
All the information in the world has been pretty dispersed, but Google's mission has been to organize it and make it universally accessible.
VC firms are... responsible for the full life cycle of a company: they find it, help it grow, open up a Rolodex, and sell it.
I loved dinosaurs, I loved space, and I thought maybe I'd be the first paleo-astronaut.
Government is really successful when it's willing to make big, bold objectives, like, 'We're going to get to the moon.' But without leaders with big ideas, we get stuck.
The reality is if you were going to die tomorrow, and someone offered you another 10 years, most people would take those 10 years.
I'm not bothered when other VCs start hiring great designers or start recruiting. That's the direction I'd like it to go.
Antibiotics are so pervasive that they are often prescribed preemptively, as soon as patients report symptoms, before a diagnosis is made.