Quotes About Entrepreneurship

By day, I'm a venture capitalist. On weekends, I love rockets.

I always knew I wanted to start my own line. Nights and weekends, I would work on my business plan.

My father owned some Laundromats, and when I was 10, he had me in there making change and being an attendant. He taught me that on weekends, you had to get up and go to work. That has been a big help in acting.

When I started my first company, I still had a 40-hour a week job. I was working on my company on nights and weekends before I took the plunge and gave up a salary.

I want to save up money. This is probably long-term, but I for sure want to get into real estate and flip houses and start doing stuff like that. So I'm saving money. And, you know, being a kid at the same time. I want people to know I'm literally just a 16-year-old punk who's trying to hang out with some homies on the weekends.

When I finished school, I took my entire life savings - $5,000 - and invested it in a business. I was young. I was inexperienced. But I was an entrepreneur, and I was proud. And in six weeks, I was broke.

In the space of three weeks, I met a fair bunch of the guys who were just starting those little programmers' co-ops, and everybody was talking about starting businesses.

I got a call from the Oprah Winfrey Show. Oprah had chosen Spanx as one of her favorite products in 2000. I had boxes of product in my apartment and I had two weeks notice that she was going to say she loved it on TV and I had no shipping department.

Grounding airplanes to cover your butt would never have let Orville or Wilbur change the world. We would still be spending weeks to cross the Atlantic to do business in London.

At Square, we got our tech up and running in three weeks, but it took us 18 months to get licenses, banking relationships and everything else we needed to be able to move money. We had to partner up with major companies to do it.

Starting out, iRobot was not an economic rocket ship. It took six and a half years before we had enough money in the bank at the beginning of each month to make payroll. We always made it - we paid salaries at the end of the month, and I always had four weeks to figure things out.

It's really rare for people to have a successful start-up in this industry without a breakthrough product. I'll take it a step further. It has to be a radical product. It has to be something where, when people look at it, at first they say, 'I don't get it, I don't understand it. I think it's too weird, I think it's too unusual.'

I have the weirdest career in hip-hop, and I say that because I started so young. I started So So Def when I was 17 years old.

I think I do myself a disservice by comparing myself to Steve Jobs and Walt Disney and human beings that we've seen before. It should be more like Willy Wonka... and welcome to my chocolate factory.

There are two basic things that people who are creating great companies want while simultaneously creating thriving communities: They don't want to be taxed any more than they have to, because they often know that that money is not being spent effectively. And secondly, they want to feel welcome.

Startup India is welcome for the economy, but it cannot be accompanied by 'Shut Up India' in society. What gives Startup India its strength is freedom of expression, thought, and dissent. You choke this, and you choke entrepreneurship.

Everybody told me I was making a mistake by going into this business, but I know how to grow hair as well as I know how to grow cotton.

I came to the conclusion that it was unlikely that a man as really awful as I think that Steve Jobs was could possibly create a great company for the long term. I just don't believe bad guys do well in the long run.

I don't have an MBA, I don't have a qualification in music, but I am doing both - business and music - and I am doing quite well.

I would have loved to invest in Salesforce when I was active in venture. I didn't know the founder, Marc Benioff, well enough, and he didn't really rely on venture capital, but I remember the first time I met him and got to talk about Salesforce when they were still private. I thought, 'Damn, that is going to be a huge company.'

In 2014, I left my job and launched TransTech Social Enterprises, a for-profit and nonprofit hybrid model focusing on the well-being of the trans community, not on external profits for shareholders.

You have to put more of a well-rounded company together to make it in Canada, and I hope the Canadian market is going to be known for these well-performing, solid companies that people can rely on.

Young Indians are energetic and ambitious, have lots of ideas. They work around the difficult situation they face here. But the big challenge is to market products and services to the West, because costs there aren't coming down.

I was always real deep into music. From everything, all around the board - from East Coast, West Coast, down South, everywhere. I just been a fan of music and I know I always wanted to do it myself and I wanted to do it my way. So, I told myself if I ever start doing music, I'ma do it my way. That's what made me start my own label.