Quotes About Startups

Each major wave of technology innovation has given rise to one or more super-unicorns - companies that could change your life to work at or invest in if you're not lucky/genius enough to be a co-founder.

One of the things that I've always loved to do is brainstorm ideas with friends and get together and talk about what they're building... Essentially, my day-to-day is just going around and meeting entrepreneurs and talking to them about what they plan on launching.

You need to create a place where young students can flesh out their business plans and further develop their research projects and then have a fund to help students get started in their businesses.

Inexperienced entrepreneurs often want to keep their plans secret, but this is never how I've seen any of the great companies get built.

I love helping entrepreneurs. It's something I really have fun doing. It's like planting a little seed and watching it grow.

If people want to code, and they want to be entrepreneurs, there's opportunities for them to do that.

Education around entrepreneurship should start early, at secondary level, and be very robust by college level.

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.

Without disruptions, startups can't survive.

When everybody starts a company, they are so energized and passionate about it. And what happens is that a lot of times maybe that's not sustainable.

By 2016, Pitch To Rich had morphed into VOOM, the UK and Ireland's biggest and most valuable pitch competition, with more than £1 million of prizes on offer. As the posters said: 'I've got 99 problems but a pitch ain't one!

When (not if) regulators start looking at ICO deals they might want to investigate, they will likely start with the ones that exhibit weaknesses.

There is a huge amount of wealth that's generated here in Silicon Valley.

History suggests the 2010s will give rise to a super-unicorn or two that reflect the key tech wave of the decade, the mobile web.

Before I started Code for America, I spent my career around startups. First it was game developers, small teams trying to make hits in a tough business. Then, when I started working on the Web 2.0 events, it was web startups during times of enormous opportunity and investment.

By the beginning of the 21st century, entrepreneurs, led by Web and mobile startups, began to seek and develop their own management tools.

We were there at the beginning of the web 2.0.

The first time I went through YC, it was smaller, and the founders were younger. The advantage of that was that the set of founders who were older than us had really seen the Web 1.0 meltdown. They brought that knowledge to us.

When we were kicking around the idea for Netflix in 1997, proving out an idea was expensive and labor-intensive. There was no Squarespace, no cloud. If you wanted a website, you had to build it from scratch. If you wanted an online store, you had to completely design it yourself.

I actually made a website called Y2 Combinator, which was the Y Combinator that starts Y Combinator clones. There's a very clear difference in the quality between the companies that come from YC and the companies that don't.

I've actually started a number of businesses in my career. So I'm 28 currently, but when I was about 16, I started building Websites, and that's how I put myself through school. I went to Duke with a degree in electrical engineering, computer science, computer engineering, and then to Princeton.

Our initial idea with Stripe was that for people like us - those building apps and websites - it was incredibly difficult to take payments. So with an open mind, and maybe a useful lack of knowledge about the industry, we started building a payment product.

There are immense numbers of potential entrepreneurs who can start their own businesses among the people who are working in large organisations.

Startups are rapidly changing systems. If you use an annual review cycle, you aren't getting feedback at the same pace that you need to adapt and change the business.