There are a lot of billionaires in Silicon Valley, but in the end, we are all heading to the same place. If given the choice between making a lot of money or finding a way to make people live longer, what do you choose? – Bill Maris
In genomics, there’s a massive amount of information in which you can look for patterns and develop insights. – Bill Maris
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. – Bill Maris
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. – Bill Maris
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. – Bill Maris
With a regular venture fund, you raise, let’s say, a billion dollars, and then over the next three or four years, you’ve got to invest that money; otherwise, the people who invested with you will say, ‘What are you doing? You’re just collecting fees on our money.’ – Bill Maris
We have this powerful lever at Google Ventures, which is to invest $200 million a year. This is a huge lever. It’s not all going into one place; it’s going into lots of start ups and founders and entrepreneurs, all of which are levers to try and change the world in one way or another. – Bill Maris
We can get much better outcomes from people if we understand the genetic basis of the exact cancer that they have, what interventions might be most effective against it, what’s worked in the past and what hasn’t. – Bill Maris
As computer intelligence gets better, what will be possible when we interface our brains with computers? It might sound scary, but early evidence suggests otherwise: interfacing brains with machines can be helpful in treating traumatic brain injury, repairing spinal cord damage, and countless other applications. – Bill Maris
The reality is the technology exists now to extend life and have people live healthier, happier lives. Not to be kind of immortal – that’s not what I’m talking about. – Bill Maris
If you’re a technology investor, and you decide that you’re also going to be a healthcare investor or a green-tech investor, that doesn’t usually work out that well. There are reasons why people make their careers studying these things and becoming experts. – Bill Maris
When you build relationships with entrepreneurs, they’re not trying to optimize on price. – Bill Maris
When you apply computer science and machine learning to areas that haven’t had any innovation in 50 years, you can make rapid advances that seem really incredible. – Bill Maris
The reality is if you were going to die tomorrow, and someone offered you another 10 years, most people would take those 10 years. – Bill Maris
Humans are terrible at predicting the future. We really overestimate what we can do in the short term and underestimate what we can do in the long term… If we can glimpse even a couple of years into the future, even that’s difficult to do. – Bill Maris
To create exponential growth in health care, we need to put tremendous resources and focus behind the best human minds working in this field. – Bill Maris
As life expectancy extends beyond 80 years in some parts of the world, more people are struggling with brain diseases. For older people, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and other conditions become a major impediment to quality of life. – Bill Maris
You make a great investment in the consumer Internet, maybe you make a lot of money and create something useful, interesting, or fun. But in life sciences, you have a chance to be part of something that lets people live longer and healthier and not lose the people they care about. That is really profound. – Bill Maris
I sign off not only every investment, but every dollar that goes out the door – I’m aware of it. – Bill Maris