Quotes About Entrepreneurship

You don't have to invent the wheel, but you might want to be the company that invents the rims.

Whenever I invest, I invest in the person as well as the business.

Optimistic people play a disproportionate role in shaping our lives. Their decisions make a difference; they are inventors, entrepreneurs, political and military leaders - not average people. They got to where they are by seeking challenges and taking risks.

If you only do things where you know the answer in advance, your company goes away.

Most firms do two investments a year. They may talk to between 50 and 100 and do a couple, whereas we're talking to thousands and doing several hundred.

In Europe, there is a lower instance of startups because there's a permanent fear of failure. Everyone fears failure because it is this permanent black mark against your name, whereas in the U.S., failure seems to be par for the course.

What separates sports from entrepreneurism, however, is that in business we constantly have to overcome undefined and unpredictable challenges. Athletes train for specific events and conditions, whereas entrepreneurs generally have little idea what they will encounter along the way.

Auctomatic was a compressed start-up experience, going from start to launch to acquisition in under a year. We spent a long time building the product before getting our first customer, whereas with Stripe we made sure we had paying customers from the very start.

I never understood using Kickstarter for commercial purposes. If you want to raise money for commercial purposes, I think you should give someone a dividend. They make money, then you make money. It should be an investment, whereas I think Kickstarter's true purpose is raising money for things that are in and of themselves justifying.

There are a lot of subtle things that are harder to stamp out of a culture in terms of male entrepreneurs being mentored more than female entrepreneurs... male entrepreneurs getting several strikes against them before they're kind of let go, whereas female entrepreneurs, it's kind of one strike and you're out.

True innovation takes at least 10 to 15 years, whereas the longest that private venture capitalists are routinely willing to wait is five years. They don't join the game until all the riskiest plays have already been made - by governments.

Wherever we are seeing something getting used, that to us is an early indicator that there might be something that people want. And then let's figure out how to make that great. And then let's go figure out monetization.

The capital goes wherever the opportunities are.

As professional athletes, we get pitched business or investment opportunities all the time, wherever we are.

We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn't build the Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren't going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build.

I'm not sure whether Jeff Bezos is the greatest thing in the world coming along or if he may be the emperor with no clothes.

I hear so many startups talking about how they can raise VC instead of questioning whether they need it in the first place.

Start a part-time business and make as many mistakes as you possibly can while you still have your daytime job.

I worked as a receptionist in England for a couple of years whilst I was building up my business. I decided to take a massive pay cut from my full-time job and work as a receptionist so I could make my own business work.

I cut the feet out of control top pantyhose one night, threw them on under my white pants and realized that the toning and shaping was perfect and that the hosiery material is thin enough that I could make shape wear out of it.

When you look at every studio in the '20s or '30s, from Louis B. Mayer to Jack Warner, you see people who started with one plan and quickly shifted gears to adapt to a changing world. One of my favorite stories is that Walt Disney mortgaged his house to make 'Snow White.' He saw there was a real opportunity to change the world.

When I was 7, I came up with the idea of 'charm socks.' My mom would take me to buy bags of plastic charms, we would sew them on frilly white socks, and I sold them at school.

I worked for the Office of Management and Budget in the White House, on nuclear energy policy. But I decided it would be much more fun to have a specialty food store, so I left Washington D.C. and moved to the Hamptons. And how glad I am that I did!

What I earned in my previous years as an actor, I knew I had to invest smart to stay afloat. I was investing in a couple of businesses, some of them did decently well, some of them didn't.