Entrepreneur Quotes - 136 quotes

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Entrepreneur

An entrepreneur is an individual who initiates, organizes, and manages a business venture, assuming the financial risks with the aim of making a profit. They often come up with innovative ideas or solutions, and they are typically characterized by their willingness to take calculated risks to achieve business success.

quote icon It turns out ideas are the easy part. Execution is everything.

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quote icon There are a lot of people that have dreams. I like to say everyone who has ever had a shower has had a good idea. It's the people who dry off and do something about them that make a difference.

- Nolan Bushnel

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quote icon When I was a boy I used to uh... I used to read all about Edison and the Wright brothers, Mr. Ford, they were my heroes. Rags to riches, that's not just the name of a book, that's what this country was all about. We invented the free enterprise system where anybody, no matter who he was, where he came from, what class he belonged to, if he came up with a better idea about anything, there's no limit to how far he could go. I grew up a generation too late, I guess, because now the way the system works, the loner, the dreamer, the crackpot who comes up with some crazy idea that everybody laughs at, that later turns out to revolutionize the world, he's squashed from above before he even gets his head out of the water, because the bureaucrats they would rather kill a new idea than let it rock the boat. If Benjamin Franklin were alive today he would be thrown in jail for sailing a kite without a license. It's true. We're all puffed up with ourselves now 'cause we invented the bomb. Dropped the... Beat the daylights out of the Japanese, the Nazis. But if big business closes the door on the little guy with a new idea, we're not only closing the door on progress but we're sabotaging everything we fought for, everything the country stands for. And one day we're going to find ourselves at the bottom of the heap, instead of king of the hill having no idea how we got there, buying our radios and our cars from our former enemies. I don't believe that's going to happen. I can't believe it because if I ever stop believing in the plain ol' common horse sense of the American people there'd be no way I could get out of bed in the morning.

- Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988 Movie)

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quote icon If there's ever a point in your life when you want to take a risk to go start a business it's when you're young. Because when you're my age in your mid 50's, if you fail, it's a lot harder to recover from it, because your life span is much shorter, and you may not have the same level of energy.

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quote icon Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.

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quote icon You have to trust in something, your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road, will give you the confidence to follow your heart even when it leads you off the well worn path, and that will make all the difference.

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quote icon I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me. I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

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quote icon I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

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quote icon I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it.

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quote icon Sometimes life's gonna hit you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love.

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quote icon Your work is going to fill a large part of your life. And the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking, and don't settle.

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quote icon As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it.

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quote icon Don't let the noise of others opinions drown out your own inner voice.

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quote icon And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.

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quote icon Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.

- Abraham Lincoln

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quote icon All platforms that want consumer attention are in competition with one another. Platforms that use premium video to capture attention are in even greater competition. Whether you watch on your phone or TV, in bite-sized increments or long binge sessions, that is still finite time that must be earned. And consumers have finite resources to pay for all these things. Quibi thought by focusing on “in-between moments,” it was carving out a niche with less competition. But those moments are already saturated by social media. So in an attempt to not have any competition, Quibi made it so that everything was its competition. It competes with both Netflix and also TikTok. It competes with HBO and Instagram. Hulu and Snapchat. It’s an assault on all sides. The platform was done no favors by the rise of TikTok, which was becoming immensely popular in the US right as Quibi launched. If young consumers want to watch short-form video on their phones, they go on TikTok, which is free, wildly entertaining (some might say addictive), and can be consumed in whatever timeframe the user wants.

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quote icon Quibi can’t do premium video as well as Netflix, nor quick bites as well as TikTok, falling somewhere in the meaningless middle (behind a paywall you can only access through your phone, no less). There is no audience for that.

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quote icon One of Quibi’s original sins was that it did not allow users to share videos or images from the app to social media. It also didn’t initially allow screenshots. It eventually reversed course on that, but by then it was probably too late. It provided no apparatus with which its content could go viral. No memes. No trending hashtags. It relied almost entirely on its own marketing to drive awareness.

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quote icon But great entrepreneurs have a different response to the fear of failure. Yes, they’re afraid of failing, but they’re even more afraid of failing to try.

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quote icon In work and in life, there are two kinds of failure: actions and inactions. You can fail by starting a company that goes out of business or by not starting a company at all.

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quote icon We must use what we have to invent what we desire.

- Adrienne Rich

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quote icon Entrepreneurs need to be made of a different metal from the rest of the world. You have to have the courage of your convictions; you need to be irrationally optimistic; you need to be resilient; you need to be willing to accept the fact that most people will not understand what you're trying to do; and you need to willing to take risks, because you have a bee in your bonnet, which you want to pursue more than anything else in the world.

- Aniruddha Malpani

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quote icon Startup founders, aspiring filmmakers, and would-be worldsavers “have to” be enthusiastic and positive. They have to sell their models—to skeptical investors, to potential hires, and oddly often to themselves—and many people struggle to hold both determined confidence and fundamental uncertainty in their minds at the same time. Instead, their brains use mood to encourage them to alternate. The euphoric half of the cycle is where assumptions are taken to their conclusion—where you collide your models with reality by building code, attempting to enroll customers, and so on. And the despair half is where those assumptions are challenged and questioned—where all of the fears and doubts and worrying bits of evidence that you’ve been holding off on looking at are allowed to come forward.

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quote icon Our recommendation: the next time you’re working on something large, important, and very, very uncertain, don’t resist the occasional slide into despair. In fact, don’t even think of it as a “slide”—in our experience, it stops feeling like a slide as soon as you stop resisting it. Instead, recognize it for what it is—a sign that important evidence has been building up in your buffer, unacknowledged, and that it’s time now to integrate it into your plans.

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quote icon Never let the circumstances of a moment supersede the size of your dreams.

- Bill McDermott

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quote icon We often, and rightly, describe the Founding Fathers as great, wise and noble men – which they clearly were. However, the Founders were not just upset about tea and taxes, nor were they strictly politically centered people – above all they were entrepreneurs and business owners who wanted to pursue their passions and dreams without the heavy hand of government controlling, regulating or determining their destiny.

- Boyd Matheson

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quote icon The key to life is trying to find something you would do for free anyway and get paid for it.

- Caitlin Moran

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quote icon Put yourself out there. Get started, do something and start small. The lower your startup costs, the easier it is to find profitability. Create value for others, and you'll be rewarded.

- Cameron Johnson

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quote icon You say "I want to be an entrepreneur". That's your first mistake. Nobody is an entrepreneur for "wanting to be an entrepreneur". Entrepreneurship is not a career option nor a goal. It's a consequence of many actions.

- Carlo Mazzini

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quote icon Stop just thinking about it and make it happen. When you're young is the best time to start your own business, as you do not have the responsibilities you will have when you're older. The worst that can happen if you fail now is that you have firsthand experience to make your next venture a success.

- Catherine Cook

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quote icon Solve real problems and make cash. It’s really that simple, but all the hype makes it look like it’s complicated.

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quote icon Entrepreneurs are scientists and the real world is their lab.

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quote icon I have realized that, whether the company is in the tech space or not, there is a tech component to every business that needs to be addressed.

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quote icon When thinking about starting a business, I think it’s actually better to start in a trough and come to market in a peak, than the other way around.

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quote icon Starting and growing a business is as much about the innovation, drive and determination of the people who do it as it is about the product they sell.

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quote icon I think it is a mistake to hire huge numbers of people to get a complicated job done. Numbers will never compensate for talent in getting the right answer (two people who don't know something are no better than one), will tend to slow down progress, and will make the task incredibly expensive

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quote icon One thing that is important is that, if you have a choice between a lower valuation with someone you really like, or higher valuation with someone you have a question mark about, take the lower valuation.

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quote icon Everything works in PowerPoint; but if you have the physical item or some demonstration software, that's much more convincing to people than a PowerPoint presentation or a business plan.

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quote icon Every person in your company is a vector. Your progress is determined by the sum of all vectors.

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quote icon I love Twitter. How much is it?

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quote icon No one should put this many hours into work. This is not good. People should not work this hard. They should not do this. This is very painful. ...it hurts my brain and my heart. ... This is not recommended for anyone. ... I just did it because if I didn't do it, then there was a good chance Tesla would die.

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quote icon Don’t be in a rush to get big. Be in a rush to have a great product.

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quote icon Success is the good fortune that comes from aspiration, desperation, perspiration, and inspiration.

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quote icon But the greatest companies aren't an idea, they’re an idea machine.

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quote icon An idea machine also invests in its idea generating capacity. A great company’s deepest innovation isn't in its product but in its being: a deeply idiosyncratic approach to hiring and working, accumulated through a million tiny acts of discipline and bizarre decisions, which alienates most outsiders, but draws a few in with the special, strange intensity of a children's story, as if it had been made for them alone.

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quote icon But the best companies become more, not less, idiosyncratic over time. They know that to do weird, they have to be weird. This idiosyncrasy has created a culture of beauty at Apple, of hacking at Facebook, of efficiency at Amazon.

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quote icon Being in charge of something new starts the game all over again, no matter what you’ve done before.

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quote icon Contrary to the stereotype, startups are a marathon, not a sprint. The truth is, you are not going to be a billion dollar company or acquired in the next 18 months.

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quote icon If a goal is truly visionary, it's going to be confronted by doubters, skeptics, and those threatened by its realization. As a result, there will always be walls put up on the way to achieving the objective. Some of the most capable people I've worked with know how to go over, around, or straight through those walls by virtue of their resourcefulness and sheer force of will.

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quote icon Often, the most extraordinary opportunities are hidden among the seemingly insignificant events of life. If we do not pay attention to these events, we can easily miss the opportunities.

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quote icon You don't get paid for the hour. You get paid for the value you bring to the hour.

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quote icon If you want to succeed you should strike out on new paths, rather than travel the worn paths of accepted success.

- John D. Rockefeller

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quote icon If you attempt to protect an idea too early, you risk expending energy and resources protecting an unworthy, ill-formed idea.

- John Greathouse

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quote icon I admire entrepreneurs who take risks and break new ground. They are the key to economic growth. Building a business is the single best and most effective way to create personal wealth. But it’s also true that most of those dreams are simply dreams and will never come true. A few who bet on them win big, but most lose some or all of their investment.

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quote icon How do I pitch investors in the stage of ideation? I have one word of advice: Don’t! Ideas are ‘a dime a dozen’, as they say in the USA. What matters much more is whether you and your team can effectively implement your idea, whether customers actually want or need and will pay for what you propose to sell, and much more.

- John W Mullins

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quote icon Instead of seeking capital, go find a paying customer (Yes, even before you’ve produced your product). Then find another one. As prominent venture capital investor Mark Suster, says, “Ring the cash register!”

- John W Mullins

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quote icon Once the prototype is up, it’s typically the traction, partnerships, or early feedback that makes or breaks a startup's shot at a clean launch.

- Jonathan Brill

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quote icon Fill your team with members who believe in your idea. If someone starts to doubt your company and what you're doing you need to get rid of them.

- Juliette Brindak

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quote icon The novelty of working on something new fades pretty quickly.

- Justin Bariso

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quote icon Being a successful employee requires continually honing a talent for diplomacy and collaboration. In turn, you’re rewarded with security and a steady salary, with fewer of the headaches from which entrepreneurs suffer. Running a business on the other hand, is an all-consuming, all-encompassing venture, which totally invigorates some, and totally exhausts others.

- Kevin O'Leary

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quote icon I do believe that you can achieve more if you're willing to take risks. There's almost a total correlation between the amount of risk you're willing to take and then the amount of stuff you then potentially can get done.

- Lars Rasmussen

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quote icon People who say it takes money to make money are using the worst excuse ever. Create massive value for others by providing a solution where no other exists.

- Matt Mickiewicz

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quote icon You've got to be passionate about it...I think people that look for great ideas to make money aren't nearly as successful as those who say, 'OK, what do I really love to do?

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quote icon Sometimes you have to wait for the right deal. They all seem good, at least at first, and they may make you some quick money. But when the right deal comes, and it fits into your [overall] plan, it's just overwhelming success.

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quote icon If opportunity doesn't knock, build a door.

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quote icon One sound idea is all that you need to achieve success.

- Napoleon Hill

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quote icon Dream big. Start small. Plan well. Work hard. Inspire everyone. You will get there.

- Oleg Vishnepolsky

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quote icon The golden rule for every business man is this: 'Put yourself in your customer's place.'

- Orison Swett Marden

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quote icon If you have a list of all the things you shouldn't do, you can turn that into a recipe for succeeding just by negating.

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quote icon In a sense there's just one mistake that kills startups: not making something users want.

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quote icon What's wrong with having one founder? To start with, it's a vote of no confidence. It probably means the founder couldn't talk any of his friends into starting the company with him.

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quote icon If you make anything good, you're going to have competitors, so you may as well face that.

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quote icon It seems like the best problems to solve are ones that affect you personally.

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quote icon In some fields the way to succeed is to have a vision of what you want to achieve, and to hold true to it no matter what setbacks you encounter. Starting startups is not one of them. The stick-to-your-vision approach works for something like winning an Olympic gold medal, where the problem is well-defined. Startups are more like science, where you need to follow the trail wherever it leads.

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quote icon You have to be prepared to see the better idea when it arrives. And the hardest part of that is often discarding your old idea.

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quote icon One reason to launch quickly is that it forces you to actually finish some quantum of work. Nothing is truly finished till it's released; you can see that from the rush of work that's always involved in releasing anything, no matter how finished you thought it was. The other reason you need to launch is that it's only by bouncing your idea off users that you fully understand it.

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quote icon Perhaps there's a rule here: perhaps you create wealth in proportion to how well you understand the problem you're solving, and the problems you understand best are your own.

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quote icon We have three general suggestions about hiring: (a) don't do it if you can avoid it, (b) pay people with equity rather than salary, not just to save money, but because you want the kind of people who are committed enough to prefer that, and (c) only hire people who are either going to write code or go out and get users, because those are the only things you need at first.

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quote icon As one VC who spoke at Y Combinator said, "Once you take several million dollars of my money, the clock is ticking." If VCs fund you, they're not going to let you just put the money in the bank and keep operating as two guys living on ramen. They want that money to go to work. At the very least you'll move into proper office space and hire more people. That will change the atmosphere, and not entirely for the better. Now most of your people will be employees rather than founders. They won't be as committed; they'll need to be told what to do; they'll start to engage in office politics.

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quote icon When you raise a lot of money, your company moves to the suburbs and has kids.

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quote icon As a founder, you have to manage your investors. You shouldn't ignore them, because they may have useful insights. But neither should you let them run the company. That's supposed to be your job.

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quote icon No one trusts an idea till you embody it in a product and use that to grow a user base.

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quote icon There's nothing like users for convincing acquirers. It's not just that the risk is decreased. The acquirers are human, and they have a hard time paying a bunch of young guys millions of dollars just for being clever. When the idea is embodied in a company with a lot of users, they can tell themselves they're buying the users rather than the cleverness, and this is easier for them to swallow.

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quote icon If you're going to attract users, you'll probably have to get up from your computer and go find some. It's unpleasant work, but if you can make yourself do it you have a much greater chance of succeeding.

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quote icon If you want to start a startup, you have to face the fact that you can't just hack. At least one hacker will have to spend some of the time doing business stuff.

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quote icon The failed startups you hear most about are the spectactular flameouts. Those are actually the elite of failures. The most common type is not the one that makes spectacular mistakes, but the one that doesn't do much of anything—the one we never even hear about, because it was some project a couple guys started on the side while working on their day jobs, but which never got anywhere and was gradually abandoned.

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quote icon All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.

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quote icon It's true that every great entrepreneur is first and foremost a designer.

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quote icon However, the phenomenon of serial entrepreneurship would seem to call into question our tendency to explain success as the product of chance.

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quote icon ...being the first mover doesn't do you any good if someone comes along and unseats you.

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quote icon We knew we'd need more funding to reach that goal. We also knew that the boom was going to end. Since we didn't expect investors' faith in our mission to survive the coming crash, we moved fast to raise funds while we could.

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quote icon We knew we'd need more funding to reach that goal. We also knew that the boom was going to end. Since we didn't expect investors' faith in our mission to survive the coming crash, we moved fast to raise funds while we could.

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quote icon There’s a bit of hidden magic in every mistake. The magic is called learning.

- Robert Kiyosaki

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quote icon I used to think the billion dollar Silicon Valley start-up thing was the only business worth starting. But as I've gotten older and a bit more experienced, I've come to realize that there is a lot of value in small, simple cash-flow businesses that generate $1,000 or more per month and pretty much run themselves. So consider starting a few of these first before you try to change the world.

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quote icon I've been my own boss for many years now, but the more time I spend trying to build businesses the more I appreciate the benefits of being an employee.

- Sam Priestley

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quote icon The biggest risk in life is not risking. Every risk you take in life is in direct proportion to the reward.

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quote icon To turn really interesting ideas and fledgling technologies into a company that can continue to innovate for years, it requires a lot of disciplines.

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quote icon Founders of startups are often quick to sell up, rather than building their ventures into big global companies.

- The Economist

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quote icon In a nutshell, Mr Christensen’s insight was that it is not stupidity that prevents great firms from foreseeing disruption but rather their supreme rationality. They do “the right thing”, focusing on better products for their best and most profitable clients, often to the point of over-engineering (how many Mach and Fusion blades does a chin need?). But that is “the wrong thing” if it blinds them to the threat from poorly capitalised upstarts offering cheaper stuff in markets too obscure to worry about. Such threats can swiftly turn existential if the rivals move upmarket and go for the jugular.

- The Economist

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quote icon Datasets reflect back the world as it is, for example, not the world as it might be.

- The Economist

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quote icon Founding a company doesn't entitle you to lifetime tenure. Like every employee, you have to earn and re-earn your standing - and companies are pretty unsentimental about that stuff. If you stop being useful, you get quickly shuttled to the side. That said, the Founder does have a distinct advantage that comes with the title, and with that a unique opportunity to contribute. It takes self-awareness, and the confidence to hand over the reins, but it can be a very healthy and productive long term role.

- Tim Westergren

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quote icon You are going to go through periods where you feel like you've made a big mistake. As your friends progress along more established paths, you'll often feel like you're falling behind. Get comfortable with it. It's the life you've chosen. And when you do go through those times, just remind yourself that you won't be the one, fifty years from now, telling your grandkids you wished you tried starting a company.

- Tim Westergren

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quote icon Identify your problems but give your power and energy to solutions.

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quote icon It is the privilege of true genius, and certainly of the genius that opens a new road, to make without punishment great mistakes.

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quote icon I suppose my formula might be: dream, diversify and never miss an angle.

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quote icon Some of us just wouldn't be satisfied with just carrying out a routine job and being happy.

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quote icon But all individuals are different. Some of us just wouldn't be satisfied with just carrying out a routine job and being happy. Yet I envied those people. I had a brother who I really envied because he was a mailman. But he's the one that had all the fun. He had himself a trailer, and he used to go out and go fishing, and he didn't worry about payrolls and stories and picture grosses or anything. And he was the happy one. I always said, "He's the smart Disney."

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quote icon It's kind of fun to do the impossible.

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quote icon Courage is the main quality of leadership, in my opinion, no matter where it is exercised. Usually it implies some risk — especially in new undertakings. Courage to initiate something and to keep it going, pioneering an adventurous spirit to blaze new ways, often, in our land of opportunity.

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quote icon I do not like to repeat successes, I like to go on to other things.

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quote icon Somehow, I can't believe that there are any heights that can't be scaled by a man by a man who knows the secret of making dreams come true. The special secret it seems to me is summarized in four C's. They are Curiosity, Courage, Confidence and Constancy. And the greatest of all is Confidence. When you believe in a thing, believe in it all the way, implicitly and unquestionably.

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quote icon All you've got to do is own up to your ignorance honestly, and you'll find people who are eager to fill your head with information.

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quote icon Around here, however, we don't look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we're curious… and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.

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quote icon To the youngsters of today, I say believe in the future, the world is getting better; there still is plenty of opportunity. Why, would you believe it, when I was a kid I thought it was already too late for me to make good at anything.

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quote icon It hurts to find out your ideas are dumb, so you have to really want to know the truth more than you want to feel comfortable.

- William Pietri

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quote icon A lot of people want to make a product, not a business. What's the difference? The latter makes enough money to pay the bills. I get it: products are exciting; commerce is banal and a little grubby. But until it's a solid business, it's not sustainable.

- William Pietri

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quote icon Some people are really worried about what the competition thinks. Or what their friends will think. Or what's cool in Silicon Valley. Or even what their investors think. When instead they should be caring about what their users think, and whether they're staying true to their own vision.

- William Pietri

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quote icon If we grow weary and give up, the goal remains for someone else to achieve.

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quote icon Don’t read success stories, you will only get a message. Read failure stories, you will get some ideas to get success.

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quote icon It's amazing what ordinary people can do if they set out without preconceived notions.

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quote icon One thing I stress everywhere I go is the absolute necessity to understand your market. That means studying your competitors, the condition of your market, where the market is going, the average lifetime value of your product, EVERYTHING.

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quote icon Regardless of what your particular niche may be, you need to stay singular in your focus. You need to understand that just because you are successful in one market does not be you will be successful in another.

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quote icon Lastly, and most importantly, I have been telling entrepreneurs for a very long time that their greatest strengths lie in not what they have but what they don’t have. It is all a matter of perception as what you may think is your biggest weakness can actually be the spark to the fire that fuels your success. This is the entire principle behind my upcoming book The Power Of Broke.

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quote icon A failure is like fertilizer; it stinks to be sure, but it makes things grow faster in the future.

- Denis Waitley

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quote icon If you don't build your dream, someone else will hire you to help them build theirs.

- Dhirubhai Ambani

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quote icon Whatever you want in life, other people are going to want it too.

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quote icon Build your own dreams, or someone else will hire you to build theirs.

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quote icon You can't expect to hit the jackpot if you don't put a few nickels in the machine.

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quote icon Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.

- George Bernard Shaw

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quote icon One finds limits by pushing them.

- Herbert A. Simon

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quote icon We can't be in survival mode. We have to be in growth mode.

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quote icon You can make money two ways - make more, or spend less.

- John Hope Bryant

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quote icon Do what you love, and you will find the way to get it out to the world.

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quote icon Impossible is just an opinion.

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quote icon Genius? Nothing! Sticking to it is the genius!...I've failed my way to success.

- Thomas Edison

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quote icon You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else.

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