Quotes About Entrepreneurship

'This will pass and it always does.' I consistently have to keep telling myself that because being an entrepreneur means that you go to those dark places a lot, and sometimes they're real. You're wondering if you can you make payroll. There is a deadline, and you haven't slept in a while. It's real.

What I did know from having started businesses before Amazon, as well as from my time at Amazon, was that when you are trying to do something new, it's really a waste of energy to spend a lot of cycles wondering whether it's going to be a success or not.

When I was eight, I bought my first puppet. It was a monkey, and I paid five cents for it. I collected some scrap wood and built myself a puppet theatre. I made 32 cents with my first show, which I thought was pretty good, and that's when I knew I would be a puppeteer when I grew up.

I started off by doing everything myself, driving the truck, going to the woodshop, buying the wood, designing the furniture, cutting it out, making it myself, finishing it, polishing it, and delivering it, and writing the invoice and writing the letters, doing the books, doing the telephone bill and everything else like that.

At fourteen or fifteen, I decided to earn my living when I grew up playing drums made from wooden beer kegs and leading a group called Keg Brando and His Kegliners. We organized a little band, but it didn't last long and didn't make any money.

My father came to the U.S. from Lebanon in 1920 when he was 8 without knowing a word of English. He traveled to Green Bay, Wis., married, bought a house, and he and my mom, Helen, raised 10 kids. Everything depended on his one-man business driving a truck.

It's not an experiment if you know it's going to work.

The American Dream is still alive out there, and hard work will get you there. You don't necessarily need to have an Ivy League education or to have millions of dollars startup money. It can be done with an idea, hard work and determination.

I faced a number of challenges whilst I built Biocon. Initially, I had credibility challenges where I couldn't get banks to fund me; I couldn't recruit people to work for a woman boss. Even in the businesses where I had to procure raw materials, they didn't want to deal with women.

I started with shoes, and with hard work and discipline, the business prospered.

Capital was always the struggle. I always had these amazing visions. Had this amazing work ethic. Had this amazing work partner in my wife. But I was always struggling for capital. I owe a lot to local banks who were willing to take chances on Jo and I early in our career.

I go to class every day with the future Facebook and Twitter and Google employees, the future innovators and entrepreneurs who might have the next big thing. Knowing that and seeing their success and work ethic makes you want to be successful. It impresses me every day. It humbles me, too.

I spent my entire childhood with my father. I started my first business at 16, and we became business partners. He's not just a mentor and somebody that I look up to, but he's also someone whom I took work ethic and determination and all of those qualities from.

In the neighborhood where my studio is, in South Central Los Angeles, there are a lot of immigrant-owned businesses. I'm constantly amazed at the level of work they do. It's above anything. For me, I think I pattern myself on that work ethic.

When I was 20 years old, if you had a $100 bill and a good idea and a strong work ethic, you could start a company.

I live by the business model that there is a better than, a less than, or a different than. Those are the three categories. I chose to be different than. The one that's different than will stand out with the proper work ethic.

I think the high-tech industry is used to developing new things very quickly. It's the Silicon Valley way of doing business: You either move very quickly and you work hard to improve your product technology, or you get destroyed by some other company.

If you work hard and you're good, you can build something for yourself.

You can work hard and be smart, but you need to think about when you're going to be part of a startup and build it. You only have so much energy, whether you want to admit it or not.

I had an idea, I was passionate about it and I had to work hard to turn that into a big success and more products.

Our educational system is not preparing people for the 21st Century. Failure is an essential part of entrepreneurship. If you work hard, you can get an 'A' pretty much guaranteed, but in entrepreneurship, that's not how it works.

Internet and mobile product development cycles are measured in months, not years. And the capital required to get a product built and into the market is less than $1 million. And the returns, when things work out, can be enormous.

The first house I bought was a little Spanish bungalow on Clinton Street in West Hollywood, right behind the Improv. I was renting it, and I asked the owners if I could buy it, and they were really nice and let me work out a deal. And I fixed it up and later sold it. That was when I realized that if you make some improvements, you can make money.

In my way of thinking, the world was my oyster, and there were thousands of products that could be developed.