Quotes About Entrepreneurship

If in 1989 I said, 'I have an idea: Bottle water and sell it. And charge more than a beer,' they would have chased me around with a giant butterfly net. The same with paying to watch a television station.

I took the process of doing as much myself as I could like a duck to water. I set up my own label and publishing, etc, and it was a fun learning curve two decades ago.

I've got $130 million in the bank and a whiteboard full of cool ideas for emerging markets and technologies where we're gonna test the waters and see what happens.

When I started my company, many people said I shouldn't launch it as a retail concept because it was too big a risk. They told me to launch as a wholesaler to test the waters - because that was the traditional way.

We are seeing a new wave of young biologists that are attacking old problems with new tools and fresh ideas, leading to new types of bio startups and creating a much-needed engine to drive Silicon Valley into the next century.

I decided to come to the U.S. in the mid '90s because the Internet, which I knew was the wave of the future, was red hot here, but hadn't yet taken off in China.

America's small businesses and manufacturers are innovators ready to usher in a new wave of growth and opportunity if given access to foreign markets.

Each major wave of technology innovation has given rise to one or more super-unicorns - companies that could change your life to work at or invest in if you're not lucky/genius enough to be a co-founder.

Back in 1995, I saw an incredible wave coming. The Internet. I knew I needed to be a part of it no matter what I did.

I observed a man sourcing candle wax from South America and selling it to Japan. I thought: 'That's unbelievable. Talking on the phone in his office, that man made money moving candle wax from one country to another.' It really interested me.

Life is like the monkey bars: you have to let go to move forward. Once you make the decision to leap into entrepreneurship, be sure to loosen your grasp on old concepts so you can swing your way to new ones.

Wayne Messam does not have any financial problems and is a classic American Success Story.

There are so many easier ways to live your life than to start a company.

In the tech world, you can reel off great products in several ways. You can have the once-in-a-lifetime gut instincts of a Steve Jobs. You can have the brainiac coding skills of a Bill Gates, Larry Page, or Sergey Brin. Or, I learned, you can have the deep intellectual curiosity and stubbornness of a Jeff Bezos.

One of the hardest things to do is to get capital. That's where we, as black business, struggles. And the other place we struggle is scale, and because we don't have an access to capital, we cannot scale.

I can't tell you the number of people who pitched something and have no idea whom they are pitching it to. They don't know the background of the investor.

At 22, I had something I loved to do - make pizza - and something I was good at: running a business.

If I'm filming 'Dragons' Den', we work flat out until 8pm, although I love seeing the weird, wonderful and plain delusional.

Sometimes you've got to break the rules to make money, that's just plain and simple.

One of the things that I've always loved to do is brainstorm ideas with friends and get together and talk about what they're building... Essentially, my day-to-day is just going around and meeting entrepreneurs and talking to them about what they plan on launching.

Entrepreneurs can't forecast accurately, because they are trying something fundamentally new. So they will often be laughably behind plan - and on the brink of success.

We had a bunch of 'we's - a fitness concept, a restaurant concept. The first business plan we had included all of them.

As you may know, I'm the co-founder and co-chairman of an asteroid company called Planetary Resources that is backed by a group of eight billionaires to implement the bold mission of extracting resources from near-Earth asteroids.

At first, we couldn't be establishment, because we didn't have any money. We were guerrilla marketers, and we still are, a little bit. But, as we became No. 1 in our industry, we've had to modify our culture and become a bit more planned.