Quotes from Vivek Wadhwa

Corporate executives and business owners need to realize that there can be no compromise when it comes to ethics, and there are no easy shortcuts to success. Ethics need to be carefully sown into the fabric of their companies.

You will find that every successful entrepreneur has suffered many setbacks. These entrepreneurs just forget to mention these when they are doing interviews with the 'Wall Street Journal' or Bloomberg TV.

No matter how well things are going, failure and disaster are just around the corner. So celebrate the good, but be ready for the bad.

I realized that, after tasting entrepreneurship, I had become unfit for the corporate world. There was no turning back. The only regret I had was having wasted my life in the corporate world for so long.

In my first company, Seer Technologies, where I was chief technology officer, we shied away from the media. We watched every word and were guarded in front of journalists.

Entrepreneurship is like a computer game in which you have to master every level before achieving success. Startups repeatedly stumble and have to go back to the drawing board. The best way to skip some levels and to increase the odds of survival is to learn from others who have already played the game.

After my health suffered due to the stress of running my second company, I had to switch careers. But I still didn't want to go back to the corporate world. So I became an academic.

Business executives need to start by spelling out and communicating their values. Then they need to lead by example. This means getting rid of the bad apples and declining opportunities that bring instant wealth at the cost of selling one's soul.

The fastest way to get kicked out of a venture capitalist's office is to say that you want to build a business that grows steadily, focuses on employees, and creates wealth over the long term. Entrepreneurs with such ambitions are considered pariahs.

Outsourcing was the bogeyman of the '90s. Protectionists portrayed it as an evil that would take American jobs away. Yes, some jobs did go offshore as people feared, but it made the global economic pie grow bigger.

The lesson is, because there will be many lemons in life, to learn to make the proverbial lemonade - and be open and honest. That's the best way of doing damage control and positioning yourself for success.

Most successful entrepreneurs share their knowledge as a way of giving back. They do not demand compensation. Those who do are usually trying to take advantage of you.

When I became an entrepreneur, I had the knowledge to develop and manage budgets, market products and review legal contracts.

The best way of dealing with the press, customers, and critics is to come clean when things go wrong and admit when you make a mistake. We are humans, and no one expects us to be perfect.

When my generation grew up, our only sources of knowledge were books, teachers, parents and friends. The encyclopedia was an item of luxury. We faced big limits in what we could learn, where we could be and who we could reach.

A key to achieving success is to assemble a strong and stable management team.

One of the biggest problems that software developers face is that technology changes rapidly. It is very hard to stay current.

If anyone tells you that you're too old to be an entrepreneur or that you have the wrong background, don't listen to them. Go with your gut instincts and pursue your passions.

In the U.S., PC-makers have no incentive to lower prices because it kills their profit margins. They keep adding new features like high-end retina displays and faster processors to justify their high prices.

Doing the right thing doesn't always bring success. But compromising ethics almost always leads to failure.

The IPO is no exit for the entrepreneur; it's the start of purgatory.

Writing a book is usually a full-time job that takes years. I didn't have years. So I decided to crowdsource content for the book.

Innovation is all about people. Innovation thrives when the population is diverse, accepting and willing to cooperate.

During the dot-com days, one could take just about any company public and reap fortunes. All you had to do was to make sky-high projections for growth, say you were in the Internet space, and go along with unscrupulous investment bankers and their analysts.