Quotes About Entrepreneurship

Frankly, as an entrepreneur, you can do only one thing and be a part of it, but through investing in different ventures, you can be a part of something new and what others are trying to build.

As counterintuitive as it sounds, 'speed to fail' should be every entrepreneur's motto. Success isn't born wholly-formed like Venus from a clamshell; it's developed through relentless trial and error.

After launching the first version of Facebook for a few thousand users, we would discuss how this should be built for the world. It wasn't even a thought that maybe it could be us. We always thought it would be someone else doing it.

Not everybody wants to be Mark Zuckerberg, but everybody wants to create a little piece of the American dream, the Silicon Valley version. I don't think that's a bad thing.

Good founders can give me a picture of the future that I can believe. And the second that I believe your version of the future, you have leverage.

To me, success was not having to have a boss and not having a day job. I've been living my own version of success since the early '90s when I first got signed. I haven't had a job since then.

There is a lot of interest in the arts, music, theatre, filmmaking, engineering, architecture and software design. I think we have now transitioned the modern-day version of the entrepreneur into the creative economy.

The mistake isn't releasing something bad. The mistake is to launch it and get PR people involved. You don't want people to start amping up expectations for an early version of your product. The best entrepreneurship happens in low-stakes environments where no one is paying attention, like Mark Zuckerberg's dorm room at Harvard.

Very few entrepreneurs don't have setbacks along the way,' said Alex. 'According to Galbraith, the wise ones chalk it up on the blackboard of experience and move on.

Turns out, half of all millennials have at least occasional side hustles.

A gardener! Isn't that the perfect description of what a real businessman is? A person who makes a flinty soil productive with the labor of his own hands, who waters it with the sweat of his own brow, and who creates a place of value for his family and for the community

A gardener! Isn't that the perfect description of what a real businessman is?

Venture capitalists, with the exception of people like Don Valentine, would tell you that they'd rather fund a great team than a great idea. The reason is that if they have a bad idea, great teams can figure out a better one. Mediocre people even with a great idea can screw it up in its execution. Or if they have a bad idea, then they aren't going to be in a position to think about how to change it. They're just going to pursue it blindly.

Wozniak: Well, we added up to the total everything that was needed. If there was anything that neither one of us knew how to do, Steve would do it. He'd just find a way to do it. He was just gung ho and pressing for this company to be successful. And me, I was pretty much only in my technical head with the circuits.

The really dramatic growth happens when a startup only has three of four people, so only three or four people see that, whereas tens of thousands see business as it's practiced by Boeing or Philip Morris.

In big companies, there's always going to be more politics and less scope for individual decisions. But seeing what startups are really like will at least show other organizations what to aim for. The time may soon be coming when instead of startups trying to seem more corporate, corporations will try to seem more like startups. That would be a good thing.

Apparently sprinters reach their highest speed right out of the blocks, and spend the rest of the race slowing down. The winners slow down the least. It's that way with most startups too. The earliest phase is usually the most productive. That's when they have the really big ideas. Imagine what Apple was like when 100% of its employees were either Steve Jobs or Steve Wozniak.

I'd say determination is the single most important quality in a startup founder. If the founders I spoke with were superhuman in any way, it was in their perseverance.

With Stripe, people who previously operated online or offline in a very limited capacity now have all the tools to work like a real online business. That's a very valuable thing.

Every prosperous person who does not work has a creative scheme that does.

Your business needs a raison d'être. Be prepared to work 24 hours a day, and be willing to take risks. And you have to love it or you won't succeed.

What is interesting to me is to find ways to work with early-stage innovators to build from the edge and work on tomorrows ideas.

As an entrepreneur, you work out solutions.

Being open source meant that I could work on the technical side (along with lots of other people), and others who had the interest and inclination could start up companies around it.