Quotes About Entrepreneurship

The reason I grew so fast in the supermarket business, without help of the banks in those days, was through my vendors. I convinced my vendors, the companies I was doing business with, if I did more business, they would do more business.

My father is Spanish, and he went to Venezuela looking for a job. He was 20 something, and he fell in love with a Venezuelan girl. He owns a company there, producing iron and bronze.

Silicon Valley has evolved a critical mass of engineers and venture capitalists and all the support structure - the law firms, the real estate, all that - that are all actually geared toward being accepting of startups.

To not run a venture into the ground, entrepreneurs need to learn what it takes to succeed.

When I started my hotel company, Joie de Vivre, at the age of 26, I saw this venture as my ticket to freedom.

Many venture capitalists say they're looking for the next big idea. But they aren't, really; they're looking for something derivative, because derivative is safe.

Selling cookies is usually a girl's first exposure to the world of business. She learns how to meet the public, talk about a product, sell the product, and is responsible for collecting money, giving change, and delivering the product. That's quite a business venture for a 7-year-old.

Many entrepreneurs, and the venture investors who back them, seek to build billion-dollar companies.

If it hadn't been for our Traf-O-Data venture, and if it hadn't been for all that time spent on UW computers, you could argue that Microsoft might not have happened.

In 2011, I started a nonprofit organization, Venture for America, to help bring talented young entrepreneurs to create thousands of jobs in Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, Birmingham, Baltimore and other cities around the country.

I was thinking what happens if I break my leg today? What can I do to prevent me going back to the place of being poor? It led me to the world of venture capitalism. How are they making money? I decided I'm going to learn as much as I can.

I've had a lot of help... from Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, venture capitalists. They've helped me out a ton.

When the venture industry started, it was enough to just have money and then it was enough to sort of have this big fuzzy brand. But now startups are getting a lot smarter.

When you have a failed pitch, you meet many more venture capitalists than you really want to.

You don't think, when you start a company as the founding CEO, that if your venture actually works, you end up with three jobs: founder, CEO, and chair of the board. The first eight years at Bonobos, I have learned a lot about the tension between the first two. It didn't even occur to me that I had the third job until much later.

Venture capitalists are like lemmings jumping on the software bandwagon.

WeWork is my fifth venture. I failed in my first, second and third, had mediocre success in the fourth.

If you go to a venture firm, what you're doing is you're buying money from them in exchange for equity. They have a commodity that they're selling and they have to differentiate themselves.

I always have awkward relationships with the ladies for whatever reason. I don't know and so here we are. I was able to sort of take all of those terrible, terrible, terrible dates and turn them into a money making venture.

Now the music industry is sort of like a Craigslist venture, right? Where you're making your own records and selling them online.

The best talent in the venture industry doesn't work in large companies and won't work in large companies.

The venture community is largely male.

That first company I started made a lot of money for the venture capitalists - nearly $30 million - but next to nothing for the founders. The companies I started after that varied between failures and mediocre successes. But at no point did I ever consider getting a 'real job.' That felt like a black and white world, and I wanted Technicolor.

When I started Net-a-Porter, I knew nothing. And I was pregnant. Starting a new venture and being pregnant for the first time are pretty similar in many ways. If you knew what was going to happen to you, you wouldn't venture down that road.