Quotes about startups

90% of Startups fail. Come in to be the 90% until we shift to rest 10%. )

I’m a firm believer that most people who do great things are doing them for the first time. Returning to my theory of hiring, I’d rather have someone all fired up to do something for the first time than someone who’s done it before and isn’t that excited to do it again. You rarely go wrong giving someone who is high potential the shot.

Love is the surprising emotion that company builders cannot ignore.

It’s hard to do a really good job on anything you don’t think about in the shower.

If you just work on stuff that you like and you’re passionate about, you don’t have to have a master plan with how things will play out.

To all young people out there: This is the time you should be fearless but not jobless. Identify the right job, find what excited you the most, find what you are the most passionate about.

If everything seems under control, you're not going fast enough.

Fail early, fail often.

Timing, perseverance, and ten years of trying will eventually make you look like an overnight success.

In chaos is where learning happens the most.

In a world hooked in "Start-ups"She was his final "Settle-down"-The Drenched Writer

here was a particular kind of energy in those early days, something I've only really found in startups. The regulars - the boring 9-to-5 people - haven’t invaded the world yet. All around you are people who practically buzz with mental adrenaline - the kind of people who sneer at words like policy and dress code and fill the office at nights with pizza and bad jokes and the relentless tip-tack-clack of keyboards. They push boundaries, turn small ideas into game-changers and small arguments into

Even in zazen you will lose yourself. When you become sleepy, or when your mind starts to wander about, you lose yourself. When your legs become painful—“Why are my legs so painful?”—you lose yourself. ”-“You just sit in the midst of the problem; when you are a part of the problem, or when the problem is a part of you, there is no problem, because you are the problem itself. The problem is you yourself. If this is so, there is no problem.”-“When you start to wander about in some delusion which i

An "eye" on the vision is more important than an "I" on the vision.

The goal - at least the way I think about entrepreneurship - is you realize one day that you can't really work anyone else. You have to start your own thing. It almost doesn't matter what the thing is. We had six different business plan changes, and then the last one was PayPal.If that one didn't work out, if we still had the money and the people, obviously we would not have given up. We would have iterated on the business model and done something else. I don't think there was ever clarity as to

It is best to be the CEO; it is satisfactory to be an early employee, maybe the fifth or sixth or perhaps the tenth. Alternately, one may become an engineer devising precious algorithms in the cloisters of Google and its like. Otherwise, one becomes a mere employee. A coder of websites at Facebook is no one in particular. A manager at Microsoft is no one. A person (think woman) working in customer relations is a particular type of no one, banished to the bottom, as always, for having spoken dire

Julius used to say that we stood on the shoulders of giants. To me it always seemed like we were in their shadow. It never occurred to me that we were the shadow that they projected, and that one day we would rise up and overwhelm them

What did journalists know of tech, anyway? Who gave a damn about the press? We were the Good Guys. Changing the World. Doing the Important Stuff.

Try to imagine the calamity of that: Zack, age twenty-eight, with no management experience, gets training from Dave, a weekend rock guitarist, on how to apply a set of fundamentally unsound psychological principles as a way to manipulate the people who report to him.

A lot of the machines that Google is built on—commodity is the polite word for them—they're regular PCs and so they're not always the most reliable.

Paul Buchheit: Then you have what we do with PCs, and that's technically pretty challenging—to take this big network of machines that are unreliable and build a big, reliable storage system out of it.

My best ideas come in the shower, where I’m showered with water, but also ideas.

Each year about 600,000 start-ups are launched. Less than 0.5 percent attract VC. Of Inc. magazine's annual list of the 500 fastest growing companies in the United States assessed over a decade (1997–2007), less than 20 percent of companies were venture backed” -“62.4 percent of VC investments were completely lost while 3.1 percent of the investments accounted for 53 percent of the profits for roughly 600 investments

If you want to make money at some point, remember this, because this is one of the reasons startups win. Big companies want to decrease the standard deviation of design outcomes because they want to avoid disasters. But when you damp oscillations, you lose the high points as well as the low. This is not a problem for big companies, because they don't win by making great products. Big companies win by sucking less than other big companies.”-“The place to fight design wars is in new markets, where

A good portfolio manager knows which companies to keep and which ones to let go. Many a GP has struggled with portfolio companies that cannot meet their value-creation milestones, or raise additional follow-on rounds of capital, or generate target returns in a time span of, say, five to seven years. The faster you recognize those losses, the better it is.”-“As David Cowan says, “Just focus on your top five—the rest is distraction.” The harder part of the investor's discipline is to know when to

Passion is the most expensive currency in the world! Start convincing others to get richer. A passionate team can achieve anything. other currencies come later.

Amidst all the hype and hoopla around this business, I wanted to emphasize the challenge—it is seductive but the failure rate is very high. And those who fail have no good place to go.

Attention deficit is no longer the supposed domain of Generation Y’s who were brought up on a diet of social media and new technology. A recent study revealed 65 percent of 55-64 year olds surf, text and watch television simultaneously.

In 2007, Stanford Business School Advisory committee asserted that self awareness was the most important attribute a leader should develop. The challenge for the modern entrepreneur is to take that path.

My major goal in business was to learn. I had legislated in my mind for failure the worse possible scenario was I would learn a lot regardless of the outcome. This goal was the foundation for success of the business. Peldi, Balsamiq

Willingness to learn is important, willingness to act on what you learn is critical.

The challenge for the entrepreneur is to find your passion and make fear history.

Sometimes you live life, and sometimes life happens to you. But you always get to choose what you do about it.” Devon Brooks

Life's too short to build something nobody wants.

a good product is not the secret to success

If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far go together", African Proverb

If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together" African Proverb

If you you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together. African Proverb

Some people say, "What difference does it make what color the winemaker is that made the wine? Judge the wines off their own merit." Like, of course. And I do believe that my wine is judged off its own merit. But the fact is that when you walk into places and people can't believe that you're the principal or you're the owner or you made the wine, it's mind-blowing to me some days. It's like, wow. That's why we need to continue talking about it.

Entrepreneurship is a scary city! NO water- dig wells, NO food- plant trees, NO family- build one, NO identity- prove yourself.

We’ve all been in positions where we felt out of place or not accepted for whatever reason. For me, that’s been my life. I’ve always been that person that stood out. And what makes you an outcast is what makes you unique, and you should harness that. Being a black sheep gives you creative license to do sh*t differently.

At the end of the day, it's just grape juice. No one needs anything that I make. The last thing we need is another wine on the shelf. So that just makes me grateful for the people who do enjoy it.

I feel like you can’t judge a book by its cover, that’s always been the story of my life. I can walk into any restaurant and people would be floored to learn that I know what I do about wine, let alone that I ran one of the best wine programs in the world.

The goal - at least the way I think about entrepreneurship - is you realize one day that you can't really work anyone else. You have to start your won thing. It almost doesn't matter what the thing is. We had six different business plan changes, and then the last one was PayPal.If that one didn't work out, if we still had the money and the people, obviously we would not have given up. We would have iterated on the business model and done something else. I don't think there was ever clarity as to

This is what entrepreneurship is all about. You start off operating from a garage. And, end up, operating from a car.

If you take one typewriter and build 100, you’ve made horizontal progress. If you have a typewriter and build a word processor, you have made vertical progress.

Part of the reward of entrepreneurship lies in having the courage to believe in yourself and take action.

People think entrepreneurs are all about fame and money. I was never in for either. And, will never be. This is a much bigger fight.

Zen is not some fancy, special art of living. Our teaching is just to live, always in reality, in its exact sense. To make our effort, moment after moment, is our way. In an exact sense, the only thing we actually can study in our life is that on which we are working in each moment. We cannot even study Buddha’s words.”-“So we should be concentrated with our full mind and body on what we do; and we should be faithful, subjectively and objectively, to ourselves, and especially to our feelings. Ev

Even though you read much Zen literature, you must read each sentence with a fresh mind. You should not say, “I know what Zen is,” or “I have attained enlightenment.” This is also the real secret of the arts: always be a beginner.”-“When you are sitting in the middle of your own problem, which is more real to you: your problem or you yourself? The awareness that you are here, right now, is the ultimate fact. ”-“Knowing that your life is short, to enjoy it day after day, moment after moment, is t

When strategy, culture, and brand harmonize, they amplify one another and resonate loud and clear.

It’s a myth that an entrepreneur cannot work in a corporation. It’s all in the mindset.

The aim of Good Investments is the ones that offer a high value product that is needed by the target market at a reasonable price and potentially fast ROI which part of the profits will be constantly used in order to improve the existing business and keep building positive image with charitable investments as part of the profits.

This is an emotional request to the for-profit startups I help to build, strategize, and monetize. I do it for free because I care for you and your vision. I don't take an equity or a salary despite knowing that you and your investors will make money, and loads of it, eventually. I help because I care. Please remember, to pay back. Not to me, but to the world. Preferably, donate to a non-profit which will never receive the investments that you can and you are; donate to children and youth who wa

The Internet Was Made For Business

Embrace iteration as the road to improvement, but don't let that lull you into rolling out poorly-thought-out crap.

You do not necessarily have to get before you do but when you do, you shall get

The most important thing is not to let fundraising get you down. Startups live or die on morale. If you let the difficulty of raising money destroy your morale, it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

..determination is the most important quality in a founder, open-mindedness and willingness to change your idea are key, and all startups face rejection at first.

Entrepreneurship is like a weighing machine whose load content should tilt towards passion to solve a pressing need, more than passion to make money.

Entrepreneurship is all about making life easier for humanity, while money becomes a bye-product.

You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible. Most startups that fail do it because they fail at one of these. A startup that does all three will probably succeed.' [Paul Graham]

If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you’re competing against a lot of people. But if you’re willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you’re now competing against a fraction of those people… Just by lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavors that you could never otherwise pursue

People are bad at looking at seeds and guessing what size tree will grow out of them. The way you’ll get big ideas in, say, health care is by starting out with small ideas. If you try to do some big thing, you don’t just need it to be big; you need it to be good. And it’s really hard to do big and good simultaneously. So, what that means is you can either do something small and good and then gradually make it bigger, or do something big and bad and gradually make it better. And you know what? Em

Entrepreneur, noun: someone who takes calculated risks to add value to wider society with the hope of making money and building wealth

When you run a business, your business is totally different from others. This means your lifestyle, your routine and what you make out of your business is totally different. You lead a different life compared to those in your neighborhood and the people you knew around your business circle.

It’s not about the content we are creating but how much content our customers are creating for us.

1. Do consumers recognize that they have the problem you are trying to solve?2. If there was a solution, would they buy it?3. Would they buy it from us?4. Can we build a solution for that problem?

A person who doesn't have a structured way of writing their goals will experience disorder, even in the comfort zone.

The really dramatic growth happens when a startup only has three of four people, so only three or four people see that, whereas tens of thousands see business as it's practiced by Boeing or Philip Morris.

Until you become so passionate about you and your business no one will. You are your first cheerleader and business promoter.