Quotes About Startup

I put together an iPhone app called TrimIt and released that in July 2011. About a month later, the private fund of the Hong Kong billionaire Li-Kashing cold emailed me and expressed an interest to invest, but they didn't realize I was 15. They thought it was a U.K. company with a team.

Starting a business from scratch and having little money in the bank focuses your mind in a way that running a multibillion-dollar business never does. It brings the key drivers of performance into sharp relief. I promise.

Start step by step. I didn't start being a big company in the beginning. You go to the bank for loans when nobody knows about you.

As anyone who has started a company knows, it's pretty common not to see any income for months.

The first follower is what transforms the lone nut into a leader," and in a startup, that first follower is usually a cofounder.

Also, like the Holy Grail, the business plan remains largely unattainable and mythological. Most experts wouldn't agree, but a business plan is of limited usefulness for a startup because entrepreneurs base so much of their plans on assumptions, "visions," and unknowns.

What's more important than making a startup attractive to investors in a beauty-contest format is to make them viable in real life.

DO NOT ADD FOUNDERS TO ENHANCE FUNDABILITY. The reason to bring in additional founders—and any other employee but especially founders—is to make your startup stronger and more likely to succeed. Ask yourself, "Would I hire this guy if we didn't need funding?" If your answer is no, you'd be insane to hire him.

Do you think we need a real CEO? Answer you're looking for: "Maybe, someday. But probably not right now. What you really need right now is a great product.

I don't know a startup that hasn't been through tough times.

I set up my own trading center in my Cabot dorm room... with my computer, my fax machine, and my telephone.

In my experience, fledgling entrepreneurs focus way too much on the money - you can get most things done and figure out a lot without spending much. That said, most businesses require money to launch and get off the ground.

I literally coded Facebook in my dorm room and launched it from my dorm room. I rented a server for $85 a month, and I funded it by putting an ad on the side, and we've funded ever since by putting ads on the side.

A common mistake among new entrepreneurs who have raised large rounds is that they have essentially infinite resources.

A 50-year-old company can innovate as well as two guys/gals in a garage.

The same instincts that make us good students can make us lousy entrepreneurs.

When trying to start a company, your enemy isn't criticism, anger or insults. Your enemy is apathy.

I founded a launch company called International Microspace when I graduated medical school in 1989. We were trying to build a microsatellite launcher.

Once you believe that you are infallible, that success will automatically lead to more success, and that you have "got it made," reality will be sure to give you a rude wake-up call. Believing your own bullshit is always a perilous activity, but never more fatal than for the owner of a start-up venture.

We lacked something that is the key to a successful startup, and it was bigger than sound quality. It was emotional investment. If you don't love what you're building, if you're not an avid user yourself, then you will most likely fail even if you're doing everything else right.

The first week after the official launch, they took $12,000 in orders and shipped $846 worth of books, according to Eric Dillon, one of Amazon's original investors. The next week they took $14,000 in orders and shipped $7,000 worth of books. So they were behind from the get-go and scrambling to catch up.

Bezos and other startup founders were reacting to lessons from previous technology giants. Microsoft took a top-down management approach with layers of middle managers, a system that ended up slowing decisions and stifling innovation. Looking at the muffled and unhappy hierarchy of the software giant across Lake Washington, Amazon executives saw a neon sign warning them exactly what to avoid.

When I was starting out, I thought about how the Internet is global and that we should have a global name, a name that's interesting. At that time, the best name was Yahoo! Suddenly I thought, 'Alibaba is a good name.'

When I left Yahoo, I was really looking for an early stage company that had some complexities and things that needed to be figured out.