Quotes About Entrepreneurship

If I had learned more about business ahead of time, I would have been shaped into believing that it was only about finances and quality management.

I think for any small business that's bootstrapped, the overwhelming challenge initially is getting to positive cash flow.

I find, in merchandising and design and creative, a business school degree isn't particularly helpful.

A man to carry on a successful business must have imagination. He must see things as in a vision, a dream of the whole thing.

When I was 13, I opened my own business called The Awesome Pretzel Company, and my dad helped me build a pretzel cart.

I had never stopped thinking about the ideal car… All I had to do was construct a plant to build it.

We have teams of people working on electric cars. So you never know - you may find Virgin competing with the Tesla in the car business as we do in the space business.

Every startup has a chance to change the world, by bringing not just a new product, but an entirely new institution into existence.

Entrepreneurship is risky mainly because so few of the so-called entrepreneurs know what they are doing.

Entrepreneurship is neither a science nor an art. It is a practice.

Entrepreneurs see change as the norm and as healthy. Usually, they do not bring about the change themselves. But – and this defines entrepreneur and entrepreneurship – the entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.

Entrepreneurship, then, is behavior rather than personality trait. And its foundation lies in concept and theory rather than in intuition.

Above all, we know that an entrepreneurial strategy has more chance of success the more it starts out with the users – their utilities, their values, their realities. An innovation is a change in market or society. It produces a greater yield for the user, greater wealth-producing capacity for society, higher value or greater satisfaction. The test of an innovation is always what it does for the user. Hence, entrepreneurship always needs to be market-focused, indeed, market-driven.

Entrepreneurial management in the new venture has four requirements: It requires, first, a focus on the market. It requires, second, financial foresight, and especially planning for cash flow and capital needs ahead. It requires, third, building a top management team long before the new venture actually needs one and long before it can actually afford one. And finally, it requires of the founding entrepreneur a decision in respect to his or her own role, area of work, and relationships.

Entrepreneurs innovate. Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurs innovate. Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship. It is the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth. Innovation, indeed, creates a resource. There is no such thing as a 'resource' until man finds a use for something in nature and thus endows it with economic value. Until then, every plant is a weed and every mineral just another rock.

Still, entrepreneurial strategy remains the decision-making area of entrepreneurship and therefore the risk-taking one. It is by no means hunch or gamble. But it also is not precisely science. Rather, it is judgement.

entrepreneurship is by no means limited to the economic sphere although the term originated there. It pertains to all activities of human beings other than those one might term "existential" rather than "social." And we now know that there is little difference between entrepreneurship whatever the sphere.

In actual practice this distinction makes no sense whatever. An enterprise, whether a business or any other institution, that does not innovate and does not engage in entrepreneurship will not survive long.

But everyone who can face up to decision making can learn to be an entrepreneur and to behave entrepreneurially. Entrepreneurship, then, is behaviour rather than personality trait. And its foundation lies in concept and theory rather than in intuition.

Exploiting opportunities produces results.

Although it's easy to forget sometimes, a share of stock is not a lottery ticket. It's part ownership of a business.

Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin didn't set out to create one of the fastest-growing startup companies in history; they didn't even start out seeking to revolutionize the way we search for information on the web. Their first goal, as collaborators on the Stanford Digital Library Project, was to solve a much smaller problem: how to prioritize library searches online.

Unlike most CEOs, when trying something new, Jeff Bezos and his senior team (known as the S Team) don't try to develop elaborate financial projections or return on investment calculations. "You can't put into a spreadsheet how people are going to behave around a new product," Bezos will say.