Quotes About Entrepreneurship

We started Airbnb because, like many across the U.S. and in New York, we were struggling to pay our rent and decided to open up our living room to fellow artists coming to town for a design conference. Sharing our apartment allowed us to stay in our home and start our company.

We started out as actors. When we were coming out of high school, we didn't want to be struggling actors, and - I remember the conversation - we were like, 'Let's invest in real estate!'

If you're going to be an entrepreneur, most likely you're going to be Type A - stubborn.

If you don't have savings, and your co-founders are as poor as you are, and if Mom and Dad won't loan you money, then your best bet is to find people that know you - your friends. If they, too, won't help, then you're stuck seeking out angel investors.

I travel a lot. I didn't want to be stuck sitting in my office managing the business.

As a student, I had a hobby of inventing new ideas for products. For me, thinking of new businesses is like inventing new products.

Answers are not enough, students should be encouraged to ask questions and explore alternatives to the norm. Entrepreneurship and invention are the backbone of the new economy, yet I doubt they get more than a nod in economics courses.

In school I studied international business and marketing, so I've always been attracted to business.

I never studied business. It's either in your DNA, or it isn't.

When I go back into education, I'm going to do business studies.

My partner, Jeff Ullrich, and I always thought Earwolf was going to be big. There were a couple of studies before we launched saying podcasts were going to really grow. But I remember so many conversations at the beginning where people would say, 'How are you going to make money with this?'

I got out of high school, bought a recording studio and started operating it as an engineer and a producer.

I have my own studio down in Miami.

All studio movies are the middle of the Bell curve. The only way to do something is to do it yourself. And the only way to do that is to not take any money from anyone or take as little money as possible from anyone and that's it.

After decades of studying the men and women that make the decision to open their own Great, Growing Company, I'd have to say it comes down to the Vision they have for that business - do they expect to build the company or just have some income for the short term?

I didn't study no rappers when I was coming up. I was studying moguls. I was studying Jay Z. I was studying Puff. I was studying Master P.

If I can make a dollar, I certainly am not stupid.

You've got to admire Sir Richard Branson. He is a completely different style of businessman to me, but you have got to admire what he has achieved.

I founded Stitch Fix to take on a very human problem: How do I find clothes I love? Like most people, I want to look stylish and feel my best. Spending a day at the mall or devoting hours of time to sifting through millions of products online is time consuming, overwhelming, and neither effective nor enjoyable. I knew there had to be another way.

I've had 20 years, 25 years of running business. I've been well trained by a number of amazing organizations and I've got a lot of implicit, subconscious pattern recognition on how to make business decisions.

New industries are created by entrepreneurs who don't necessarily have subject matter expertise when they get started, yet they are still responsible for most of the innovation we see in society.

There's going to be a Google or a Facebook or a Zynga every three to five years. Those are really big ideas that do return substantial amounts of money.

There may be a perception that, with franchises, they're all the same, so that limits the ability to experiment. But that's not true. We've always kept two slots open on the menu of each Subway franchise - slots that franchisees can use to come up with their own sandwich ideas.

The attributes for entrepreneurs cut both ways. You need the ability to ignore inconvenient facts and see the world as it should be and not as it is. This inspires people to take huge leaps of faith. But this blindness to facts can be a liability, too. The characteristics that help entrepreneurs succeed can also lead to their failure.