Quotes About Entrepreneurship

Far from being greedy, America's leading entrepreneurs—with some exceptions—display discipline and self-control, hard work and austerity, excelling those found in any college of social work, Washington think tank, or congregation of bishops.

I'm a man of business. If it adds up to a plus mark, I'm for it.

One of the nice things about living in Silicon Valley is that I end up at all these conferences and things, and I get to listen in on the zeitgeist.

Very few entrepreneurs start their business on the back of market research. Instead, they have tremendous zeitgeist, honed by paying attention to where they are.

If you were the first person ever to design an application for the iPhone and you patented it, you would be very, very better off than we are right now, you know? But you've got to be the first one to do it. So I figured that Led Zeppelin or the Stones were going to do it unless we just got on to it. So I got cracking with the guys from Apple.

In the beginning I just wanted to survive. For the first three years, we made zero revenue. I remember many times when I was trying to pay up, the restaurant owner would say, 'Your bill was paid.' And there would be a note saying, 'Mr. Ma, I'm your customer on the Alibaba platform. I made a lot of money, and I know you don't, so I paid the bill.'

Whenever you're at a poker table - and you're betting all of your chips - you're worried, you're scared. Is it the right play? Have I thought through all the angles? That's what stinks about life and business in general. If I had to calculate 100% certainty on every deal I did, I literally would do zero deals.

The goal of a private company is, first, zero to one: Get past the product-market fit; figure out whether people actually care about what you're trying to build and someone will pay you money for that. That's the zero to one problem.

In 1987, Merrill Lynch asked me to open a Swiss capital markets operation. I was 27. In hindsight, I was lucky enough to start a business from scratch. And I mean from zero - no offices, even, just a space with walls between different areas. We decided to tear down the walls.

It's good to have experience in other ventures and have other goals. Like acting, having businesses, starting from zero and making something grow.

When you look at how technology companies are funded, it's not a zero-sum game. It could be 20 investors in one company, and everybody has to work together for the benefit of that company.

Entrepreneurial Philanthropy is not just a philosophy or a dream. It is a promise that philanthropy is at its best when it is founded on entrepreneurial zest and agility.

The first cities to create friction-free enterprise zones will get a lot of entrepreneurial traction.

Competition means decentralized planning by many separate persons.

Net - the biggest word in the language of business.

Wherever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.

We are indeed a nation of shopkeepers.

The rewards in business go to the man who does something with an idea.

You can't get rich sitting on the bench.

I'm a school dropout. So, at the age of 16, I moved to Mumbai to try my luck on some business.

I had so many people try to talk me out of starting a rocket company, it was crazy.

Creativity is not just for artists. It's for businesspeople looking for a new way to close a sale; it's for engineers trying to solve a problem; it's for parents who want their children to see the world in more than one way.

All I do all day is think of ideas and implement them. That's an industry, you know. I'm trying to make art on a commercial scale.

It's a really paradoxical thing. We want to think big, but start small. And then scale fast. People think about trying to build the next Facebook as trying to start where Facebook is today, as a major global presence.