Entrepreneur Startup Quotes

If you are going to be in business, you must learn about money: how it works, how it flows, and how to put it to work for you.

The best entrepreneurs know this: every great business is built around a secret that’s hidden from the outside. A great company is a conspiracy to change the world; when you share your secret, the recipient becomes a fellow conspirator.

The most valuable businesses of coming decades will be built by entrepreneurs who seek to empower people rather than try to make them obsolete.

We love being mentally strong, but we hate situations that allow us to put our mental strength to good use.

Reading is good, action is better.

if you cannot fail, you cannot learn.

As you consider building your own minimum viable product, let this simple rule suffice: remove any feature, process, or effort that does not contribute directly to the learning you seek.

A startup is a human institution designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.

When in doubt, simplify.

Do you know great minds enjoy excellence, average minds love mediocrity and small minds adore comfort zones?

Society flourishes when people think entrepreneurally.

The big question of our time is not Can it be built? but Should it be built? This places us in an unusual historical moment: our future prosperity depends on the quality of our collective imaginations.

On Startups: "I hate it when people call themselves "entrepreneurs" when what they're really trying to do is launch a startup and then sell or go public, so they can cash in and move on.

Success is not delivering a feature; success is learning how to solve the customer’s problem.

Innovation is a bottoms-up, decentralized, and unpredictable thing, but that doesn’t mean it cannot be managed.

I enjoy self-publishing & sending publishers rejection letters. They're like, 'Who is this guy?' And I'm like, 'the end of your industry.

The lesson of the MVP is that any additional work beyond what was required to start learning is waste, no matter how important it might have seemed at the time.

Customers don’t care how much time something takes to build. They care only if it serves their needs.

This is one of the most important lessons of the scientific method: if you cannot fail, you cannot learn.

When you walk in silence your excellence will always speak for you.

Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop is at the core of the Lean Startup model.

An entrepreneur is someone who will jump off a cliff and assemble an airplane on the way down.

Metcalfe’s law: the value of a network as a whole is proportional to the square of the number of participants. In other words, the more people in the network, the more valuable the network.

Investing in a startup does not make you an entrepreneur any more than buying a grand piano makes you a concert pianist.

If we do not know who the customer is, we do not know what quality is.

Entrepreneurs don't have weekends or birthdays or holidays. Every day is my weekend, my birthday, my holiday. OR, every day is my work day. Mostly it's a choice.

An entrepreneur without funding is a musician without an instrument.

Fail soon so that you can succeed sooner.

Everyone has an idea. But it’s really about executing the idea and attracting other people to help you work on the idea.

Pivoting is not the end of the disruption process, but the beginning of the next leg of your journey.

Today it is cheaper to start a business than tomorrow.

What if we found ourselves building something that nobody wanted? In that case what did it matter if we did it on time and on budget?

No obstacle is so big that one person with determination can't make a difference.

Leadership requires creating conditions that enable employees to do the kinds of experimentation that entrepreneurship requires.

Just because you have baggage doesn't mean you have to lug it around.

Be creative while inventing ideas, but be disciplined while implementing them.

The ability to learn faster from customers is the essential competitive advantage that startups must possess.

Ask most entrepreneurs who have decided to pivot and they will tell you that they wish they had made the decision sooner.

Peter Drucker said, “There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.

Rebels revel in rewriting reality's restrictions.

Anything those customers experience from their interaction with a company should be considered part of that company’s product.

In the Lean Startup model, an experiment is more than just a theoretical inquiry; it is also a first product.

The true start-up of a business is what happens before you start-up.

The point is not to find the average customer but to find early adopters: the customers who feel the need for the product most acutely. Those customers tend to be more forgiving of mistakes and are especially eager to give feedback.

My advice was to start a policy of making reversible decisions before anyone left the meeting or the office. In a startup, it doesn’t matter if you’re 100 percent right 100 percent of the time. What matters is having forward momentum and a tight fact-based data/metrics feedback loop to help you quickly recognize and reverse any incorrect decisions. That’s why startups are agile. By the time a big company gets the committee to organize the subcommittee to pick a meeting date, your startup could have made 20 decisions, reversed five of them and implemented the fifteen that worked.

You cannot be sure you really understand any part of any business problem unless you go and see for yourself firsthand. It is unacceptable to take anything for granted or to rely on the reports of others.

All humans are entrepreneurs not because they should start companies but because the will to create is encoded in human DNA, and creation is the essence of entrepreneurship.

there is no bigger destroyer of creative potential than the misguided decision to persevere.

Entrepreneurs see what others can't, do what others won't, and accomplish what others dream.

Be Shameless. Experiment. This is the only way to identify your true passion.

All innovation begins with vision. It’s what happens next that is critical.

Failure is a prerequisite to learning.

Sell the results, not the nuts and bolts.

Rhetorical question: Did you get to where you are by accepting the status quo? I didn't.

The real challenge is for each of us to determine where we feel we can make the most impact.

It is insufficient to exhort workers to try harder. Our current problems are caused by trying too hard—at the wrong things.

Do what you love and love what you do, with excellence.

At the heart of all sales and marketing is the ability to create demand even in the absence of logic.

A 2006 Harvard University study shows that entrepreneurs who have failed in their previous enterprise have an almost one-in-five chance of success in their next start-up

This is an important rule: a good design is one that changes customer behavior for the better.

The difference between successful and unsuccessful people is that successful ones know that the most unprofitable thing ever manufactured is an excuse.

Lifelong learning is no longer a luxury but a necessity for employment.

Disruptors don't have to discover something new; they just have to discover a practical use for new discoveries.

When you were making excuses someone else was making enterprise.

Even in engineering-driven Silicon Valley, the buzzwords of the moment call for building a “lean startup” that can “adapt” and “evolve” to an ever-changing environment. Would-be entrepreneurs are told that nothing can be known in advance: we’re supposed to listen to what customers say they want, make nothing more than a “minimum viable product,” and iterate our way to success. But leanness is a methodology, not a goal. Making small changes to things that already exist might lead you to a local maximum, but it won’t help you find the global maximum. You could build the best version of an app that lets people order toilet paper from their iPhone. But iteration without a bold plan won’t take you from 0 to 1. A company is the strangest place of all for an indefinite optimist: why should you expect your own business to succeed without a plan to make it happen? Darwinism may be a fine theory in other contexts, but in startups, intelligent design works best.

Unless you have perfectly conventional beliefs, it’s rarely a good idea to tell everybody everything that you know. So who do you tell? Whoever you need to, and no more. In practice, there’s always a golden mean between telling nobody and telling everybody—and that’s a company. The best entrepreneurs know this: every great business is built around a secret that’s hidden from the outside.

Even when things are hard and exhausting and uncertain, they can still be good.

Zero invites imagination, but small numbers invite questions about whether large numbers will ever materialize.

As you begin to think like an entrepreneur, you’ll notice that business ideas can come from anywhere.

Being a great entrepreneur means finding the path through the fog, confusion and myriad of choices.

The goal of a startup is to figure out the right thing to build—the thing customers want and will pay for—as quickly as possible.

Perfection is born of imperfection.

When the going gets tough, people bail. When the going gets easy, people get lazy. Honest, smart, hard work is the way to get results.

In the end, every startup is different. But in the beginning every startup is the same.

You have a choice: pursue your dreams, or be hired by someone else to help them fulfill their dreams.

waiting too long to release can lead to the ultimate waste: making something that nobody wants.

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.

The best entrepreneurs are not the best visionaries. The greatest entrepreneurs are incredible salespeople. They know how to tell an amazing story that will convince talent and investors to join in on the journey.

entrepreneurship should be considered a viable career path for innovators inside large organizations.

For any creative thought to be contagious, it must first be worthy of a sneeze.

One of the things I’ve learnt about goals is people will write them or wrong them.

Writing and achieving your goals is not failure, not having a goal to write in the first place is the start of failure.

Many entrepreneurs who build great products simply don’t have a good distribution strategy.

Not having a recognised brand & trying to stand out in the market is like going to the market without any goods.

Entrepreneur, if you're going to start up, make sure you start up with excellence in mind

Entrepreneur, your last 20 tweets has to be about your brain, brand and business.

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

when you have only one test, you don’t have entrepreneurs, you have politicians, because you have to sell.

We are not creators; only combiners of the created. Invention isn't about new ingredients, but new recipes. And innovations taste the best.

If we stopped wasting people’s time, what would they do with it?

if you are asking, you’re not there yet.

There is a reason all past management revolutions have been led by engineers: management is human systems engineering.

It's called entrepreneurSHIP, not entrepreneurSTAY. Don't wait. Just ship.

S.T.O.P. = Start To Open Possibilities

The moment you think you know something inside out, is the moment you stop listening. That's when you go backwards faster than you progressed

When you're a startup entrepreneur, every decision you make is critical to the survival of the business. There's no unimportant decision. Every decision matters.

One common mistake we see new entrepreneurs especially tech entrepreneurs making is focusing too much on product

You can’t take learning to the bank; you can’t spend it or invest it.

Make your mistakes fast

Pursuing a rapid experiment and finding out you were wrong and changing directions isn’t failure. That is the road to success.

All businesses -- no matter if they make dog food or software -- don't sell products, they sell solutions.

Every threat to the status quo is an opportunity in disguise.

I call this building an adaptive organization, one that automatically adjusts its process and performance to current conditions.

achieving failure: successfully executing a plan that leads nowhere.

Most important, teams working in this system begin to measure their productivity according to validated learning, not in terms of the production of new features.

Startup, I have always been a bit of a troublemaker at the companies at which I have worked, pushing for rapid iteration, data-driven decision making, and early customer involvement.

The entrepreneur’s mind-set is completely different to the employee’s mind-set. The entrepreneur finds it abhorrent to conform to organizational norms, whilst the employee finds joy and stability in all that’s tried and true. It’s not that one’s wrong and the other is right. It’s the mind-set that differentiates the two.

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?

The CEO and VP of product, instead of building their business, are engaged in the drudgery of solving just one customer’s problem. Instead of marketing themselves to millions, they sold themselves to one.

This is one of the most important discoveries of the lean manufacturing movement: you cannot trade quality for time. If you are causing (or missing) quality problems now, the resulting defects will slow you down later.

The genius of niches is they are too small for large competitors, allowing a nimble entrepreneur the breathing room to focus on an underserved audience. Once you’ve succeeded in that niche, you can leverage your success to establish credibility for your business to move into larger markets.

Nobody wants a sales pitch. So instead of trying a hard sell, focus on telling a story that captivates your audience by painting a vivid picture of your vision. When you get good at storytelling, people want to be part of that story, and they’ll want to help others become part of that story too.

Startup success is not a consequence of good genes or being in the right place at the right time. Startup success can be engineered by following the right process, which means it can be learned, which means it can be taught.

Investors are people with more money than time. Employees are people with more time than money. Entrepreneurs are simply the seductive go-betweens. Startups are business experiments performed with other people’s money. Marketing is like sex: only losers pay for it.” “Company culture is what goes without saying. There are no real rules, only laws. Success forgives all sins. People who leak to you, leak about you. Meritocracy is the propaganda we use to bless the charade. Greed and vanity are the twin engines of bourgeois society. Most managers are incompetent and maintain their jobs via inertia and politics. Lawsuits are merely expensive feints in a well-scripted conflict narrative between corporate entities. Capitalism is an amoral farce in which every player—investor, employee, entrepreneur, consumer—is complicit.

In stark contrast, China’s startup culture is the yin to Silicon Valley’s yang: instead of being mission-driven, Chinese companies are first and foremost market-driven. Their ultimate goal is to make money, and they’re willing to create any product, adopt any model, or go into any business that will accomplish that objective. That mentality leads to incredible flexibility in business models and execution, a perfect distillation of the “lean startup” model often praised in Silicon Valley. It doesn’t matter where an idea came from or who came up with it. All that matters is whether you can execute it to make a financial profit. The core motivation for China’s market-driven entrepreneurs is not fame, glory, or changing the world. Those things are all nice side benefits, but the grand prize is getting rich, and it doesn’t matter how you get there.

I simply don’t have it in me to define my life’s success playing someone else’s game and following someone else’s rulebook.” --Dipa to her Grandfather

All human beings are entrepreneurs.

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

Gamblers take blind risks. Entrepreneurs take risks while visually impaired and feel their way up and out.

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

A job pays you for what the role/designation does rather than for what you can do, which is why the compensation it pays doesn’t justify your capabilities.

An entrepreneur with strong network makes money even when he is asleep.

The majority of people are not willing to risk what they have built for the opportunity to have something better.

No one who ever led a nation got there by following the path of another.

A product in the marketplace is the result of thought in an inner space and action more than the common place.

Lean thinking defines value as providing benefit to the customer; anything else is waste.

Selling is a sacred trust between buyer and seller.

Vanity metrics wreak havoc because they prey on a weakness of the human mind.

The common tendency of product development is to skip straight to the fourth question and build a solution before confirming that customers have the problem.

Part of the special challenge of being a startup is the near impossibility of having your idea, company, or product be noticed by anyone, let alone a competitor.

Entrepreneur, if you're going to start up, make sure you start up with excellence in mind”.

New customers come from the actions of past customers.

One who doesn't recognise an opportunity is bigger loser than one who tries his hand at an opportunity.

Growth-minded people seem to take the attitude, “Anything can be improved upon, and I’m the one to do it.

The path you make is the one that follows you, and you walk on that path day or later.

Most startups eventually pivot to adjust to what the market is telling them.

Learning to embrace and savor rejection is one of the best things that entrepreneurs can do. Launching a startup is the time to find your ever-optimistic inner child again.

Ideas are meaningless without a masterful execution.

Business is still more often about whom you know, not what you know.

They will ask to go back to the old way of working, in which they had the opportunity to “stay efficient” by working in larger batches and passing work between departments.

Starting a business with brother either ends business or ends brotherhood.

Depth gets context when breadth gets attention.⁣

If building a startup is a roller-coaster ride, then fund-raising is a roller coaster in the dark - you don't even know what's coming!

You'll never know how close you are to victory if you give up.

Starting each day with a positive mindset is the most important step of your journey to discovering opportunity.

Your energy is a valuable resource, distribute it wisely.

The most important tool you have on a resume is language.

Success doesn't teach as many lessons as failure

Act NOW on those ideas! As they say, you snooze you lose. Or as I say, if you BEGIN you WIN.

They had “achieved failure”—successfully, faithfully, and rigorously executing a plan that turned out to have been utterly flawed.

we must focus our energies exclusively on producing outcomes that the customer perceives as valuable.

Speed to fail should be every entrepreneur's motto. When you finally find the one idea that can't be killed, go with it.

Insight and drive are all the skills you need. Everything else can be hired.

It is not incumbent on the world to conform to your vision of change. It is up to you to explain the future in terms that those living in the past and present can follow.

To be successful, innovation is not just about value creation, but value capture.

life is not a portfolio: not for a startup founder, and not for any individual. An entrepreneur cannot “diversify” herself: you cannot run dozens of companies at the same time and then hope that one of them works out well. Less obvious but just as important, an individual cannot diversify his own life by keeping dozens of equally possible careers in ready reserve.

the Lean Startup is a new way of looking at the development of innovative new products that emphasizes fast iteration and customer insight, a huge vision, and great ambition, all at the same time.

Entrepreneurs who kept their day jobs had 33 percent lower odds of failure than those who quit. If you’re risk averse and have some doubts about the feasibility of your ideas, it’s likely that your business will be built to last. If you’re a freewheeling gambler, your startup is far more fragile.

Ideas become reality. once you hit that reality, you get a new idea. it's a virtuous upward spiral. However, the majority are satisfied living within the idea of the reality instead of the reality of the idea.

Entrepreneurs often mistake their business plan as a cookbook for execution, failing to recognize that it is only a collection of unproven assumptions. At its back, a revenue plan blessed by an investor, and composed overwhelmingly of guesses, suddenly becomes an operating plan driving hiring, firing, and spending. Insanity.

It’s one thing if a mistake occurs because of circumstance or a miscalculation or the unexpected or inexperience; it’s another if it’s part of a pattern of carelessness or ineptitude or laziness. Then it becomes a choice.

Just as scientific experimentation is informed by theory, startup experimentation is guided by the startup’s vision. The goal of every startup experiment is to discover how to build a sustainable business around that vision.

Pretend that every single person you meet has a sign around his or her neck that says ‘Make Me Feel Important.’ Not only will you succeed in business, but you will succeed in life.” —MARY KAY ASH, FOUNDER OF MARY KAY COSMETICS

Her emergence tapped into the public’s hunger to see a female entrepreneur break through in a technology world dominated by men. Women like Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer and Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg had achieved a measure of renown in Silicon Valley, but they hadn’t created their own companies from scratch. In Elizabeth Holmes, the Valley had its first female billionaire tech founder.

If a competitor can outexecute a startup once the idea is known, the startup is doomed anyway. The reason to build a new team to pursue an idea is that you believe you can accelerate through the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop faster than anyone else can.

What differentiates the success stories from the failures is that the successful entrepreneurs had the foresight, the ability, and the tools to discover which parts of their plans were working brilliantly and which were misguided, and adapt their strategies accordingly.

As a startup entrepreneur, you need to know who your ideal customer is. Your new business will likely fail before it starts if you don’t know your ideal customer. And honestly, if you don’t know your ideal customer, there’s no purpose for the business to even exist anyway.

Once the baseline has been established, the startup can work toward the second learning milestone: tuning the engine. Every product development, marketing, or other initiative that a startup undertakes should be targeted at improving one of the drivers of its growth model.

In the end, MLMs aren’t in the business of selling start-up ventures to entrepreneurs. Like most destructive “cults,” they’re in the business of selling the transcendent promise of something that doesn’t actually exist. And their commodity isn’t merchandise, it’s rhetoric.

I run Venture for America, a nonprofit organization that recruits dozens of our country’s top graduates each year and places them in startups and growth companies in Detroit, New Orleans, Las Vegas, Providence, Cincinnati, Baltimore, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and other cities around the country. Our goal is to help create 100,000 new US jobs by 2025. We supply talent to early-stage companies so that they can expand and hire more people. And we train a critical mass of our best and brightest graduates to build enterprises and create new opportunities for themselves and others.

After more than ten years as an entrepreneur, I came to reject that line of thinking. I have learned from both my own successes and failures and those of many others that it’s the boring stuff that matters the most. Startup success is not a consequence of good genes or being in the right place at the right time. Startup success can be engineered by following the right process, which means it can be learned, which means it can be taught.

In my Toyota interviews, when I asked what distinguishes the Toyota Way from other management approaches, the most common first response was genchi gembutsu—whether I was in manufacturing, product development, sales, distribution, or public affairs. You cannot be sure you really understand any part of any business problem unless you go and see for yourself firsthand. It is unacceptable to take anything for granted or to rely on the reports of others.

Third, many entrepreneurs are afraid. Acknowledging failure can lead to dangerously low morale. Most entrepreneurs’ biggest fear is not that their vision will prove to be wrong. More terrifying is the thought that the vision might be deemed wrong without having been given a real chance to prove itself.

For a company to be valuable it must grow and endure, but many entrepreneurs focus only on short-term growth. They have an excuse: growth is easy to measure, but durability isn’t. Those who succumb to measurement mania obsess about weekly active user statistics, monthly revenue targets, and quarterly earnings reports. However, you can hit those numbers and still overlook deeper, harder-to-measure problems that threaten the durability of your business.

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 is something apart from you yourself, then your surroundings are not real anymore, and your mind is not real anymore. If you yourself are deluded, then your surroundings are also a misty, foggy delusion. Once you are in the midst of delusion, there is no end to delusion. You will be involved in deluded ideas one after another. Most people live in delusion, involved in their problem, trying to solve their problem. But just to live is actually to live in problems. And to solve the problem is to be a part of it, to be one with it.

Visionaries are especially afraid of a false negative: that customers will reject a flawed MVP that is too small or too limited. […] The solution to this dilemma is a commitment to iteration. You have to commit to a locked-in agreement—ahead of time—that no matter what comes of testing the MVP, you will not give up hope. Successful entrepreneurs do not give up at the first sign of trouble, nor do they persevere the plan right into the ground. Instead, they process a unique combination of perseverance and flexibility.

In life, you get what you believe you deserve.

As an entrepreneur, the story you start with is probably wrong. But until you start testing your underlying hypotheses, you don’t know how you’re wrong.

Entrepreneurs pay the price of a road less traveled, while everyone else takes the freeway and perpetually misses their own exit.

Making a product is just an activity, making a profit on a product is the achievement.

The Lean Startup asks people to start measuring their productivity differently. Because startups often accidentally build something nobody wants, it doesn’t matter much if they do it on time and on budget. The goal of a startup is to figure out the right thing to build—the thing customers want and will pay for—as quickly as possible. In other words, the Lean Startup is a new way of looking at the development of innovative new products that emphasizes fast iteration and customer insight, a huge vision, and great ambition, all at the same time.

The second reason that deep work is valuable is because the impacts of the digital network revolution cut both ways. If you can create something useful, its reachable audience (e.g., employers or customers) is essentially limitless—which greatly magnifies your reward. On the other hand, if what you’re producing is mediocre, then you’re in trouble, as it’s too easy for your audience to find a better alternative online. Whether you’re a computer programmer, writer, marketer, consultant, or entrepreneur, your situation has become similar to Jung trying to outwit Freud, or Jason Benn trying to hold his own in a hot start-up: To succeed you have to produce the absolute best stuff you’re capable of producing—a task that requires depth.

Only 5 percent of entrepreneurship is the big idea, the business model, the whiteboard strategizing, and the splitting up of the spoils. The other 95 percent is the gritty work that is measured by innovation accounting: product prioritization decisions, deciding which customers to target or listen to, and having the courage to subject a grand vision to constant testing and feedback.

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 the life of “form is form and emptiness is emptiness.” - “You may feel as if you are doing something special, but actually it is only the expression of your true nature; it is the activity which appeases your inmost desire. But as long as you think you are practicing zazen for the sake of something, that is not true practice.” - “The most important thing is to forget all gaining ideas, all dualistic ideas. In other words, just practice zazen in a certain posture.

Its going to be a rocky relationship you are going to have with your business, don’t marry it if you don’t love it! Its going to be rough sometimes, but navigating through the lows allows you to create something beautiful!

<...> I think we didn't know what we were doing. I think the hallmark of a really good entrepreneur is that you're not really going to build one specific company. The goal—at least the way I think about entrepreneur- ship—is you realize one day that you can't really work for anyone else. You have to start your own thing. It almost doesn't matter what that thing is. We had six different business plan changes, and then the last one was PayPal.

Money Is a Magnifying Glass Money makes you more of who you already are. If you are a jerk, it will make you a bigger jerk; if you’re insecure, you become even more insecure; if you are generous, you become even more generous; if you are nice, you become even nicer. Making money is like holding up a magnifying glass to who you are, personally and professionally. It creates a lot of energy and power, and it’s up to you to use that in a really good way.

It was actually very difficult., especially during the first five years of the start-up stage, when all the odds seemed to be against us—this is probably true for most entrepreneurs. To succeed, you really have to put your heart and soul into it. (p. 71)

third of the variants for success are simple competencies. These include, but are not limited to: Possessing a drive for results and being able to get results from others The ability to make decisions, including unpopular decisions Strategic agility when dealing with ambiguity A certain level of risk tolerance Financial acumen Critical thinking, which is an innate trait Tactical ability Perseverance Self-awareness, which includes the ability to work through your weaknesses and not have blind spots Interpersonal skills The

Entrepreneurs are everywhere. You don’t have to work in a garage to be in a startup. The concept of entrepreneurship includes anyone who works within my definition of a startup: a human institution designed to create new products and services under conditions of extreme uncertainty. That means entrepreneurs are everywhere and the Lean Startup approach can work in any size company, even a very large enterprise, in any sector or industry. 2. Entrepreneurship is management. A startup is an institution, not just a product, and so it requires a new kind of management specifically geared to its context of extreme uncertainty. In fact, as I will argue later, I believe “entrepreneur” should be considered a job title in all modern companies that depend on innovation for their future growth. 3. Validated learning. Startups exist not just to make stuff, make money, or even serve customers. They exist to learn how to build a sustainable business. This learning can be validated scientifically by running frequent experiments that allow entrepreneurs to test each element of their vision. 4. Build-Measure-Learn. The fundamental activity of a startup is to turn ideas into products, measure how customers respond, and then learn whether to pivot or persevere. All successful startup processes should be geared to accelerate that feedback loop. 5. Innovation accounting. To improve entrepreneurial outcomes and hold innovators accountable, we need to focus on the boring stuff: how to measure progress, how to set up milestones, and how to prioritize work. This requires a new kind of accounting designed for startups—and the people who hold them accountable.

This is the same problem that established companies experience. Their past successes were built on a finely tuned engine of growth. If that engine runs its course and growth slows or stops, there can be a crisis if the company does not have new startups incubating within its ranks that can provide new sources of growth. Companies of any size can suffer from this perpetual affliction. They need to manage a portfolio of activities, simultaneously tuning their engine of growth and developing new sources of growth for when that engine inevitably runs its course.

Throw in the valley’s rich history of computer science breakthroughs, and you’ve set the stage for the geeky-hippie hybrid ideology that has long defined Silicon Valley. Central to that ideology is a wide-eyed techno-optimism, a belief that every person and company can truly change the world through innovative thinking. Copying ideas or product features is frowned upon as a betrayal of the zeitgeist and an act that is beneath the moral code of a true entrepreneur. It’s all about “pure” innovation, creating a totally original product that generates what Steve Jobs called a “dent in the universe.” Startups that grow up in this kind of environment tend to be mission-driven. They start with a novel idea or idealistic goal, and they build a company around that. Company mission statements are clean and lofty, detached from earthly concerns or financial motivations.

I hate it when people call themselves “entrepreneurs” when what they’re really trying to do is launch a startup and then sell or go public, so they can cash in and move on. They’re unwilling to do the work it takes to build a real company, which is the hardest work in business. That’s how you really make a contribution and add to the legacy of those who went before. You build a company that will still stand for something a generation or two from now. That’s what Walt Disney did, and Hewlett and Packard, and the people who built Intel. They created a company to last, not just to make money. That’s what I want Apple to be.

No matter what your reason for wanting to start your own business, developing the foundation is the same. Laying a solid foundation for you business will provide you with a road map to follow as you build your business. As you work through the Start a Business Step-by-Step Workbook you will define the company’s mission, decide what business entity is right for your business, name your business, determine the pricing for your products or services, formulate your financial projections, define your competitors, survey consumers regarding your products or services, determine the marketing methods right for your business and more.

You fail if you don’t try. If you try and you fail, yes, you’ll have a few articles saying you’ve failed at something. But if you look at the history of American entrepreneurs, one thing I do know about them: An awful lot of them have tried and failed in the past and gone on to great things.” —RICHARD BRANSON, FOUNDER OF THE VIRGIN GROUP

Entrepreneurs who kept their day jobs had 33 percent lower odds of failure than those who quit. If you’re risk averse and have some doubts about the feasibility of your ideas, it’s likely that your business will be built to last. If you’re a freewheeling gambler, your startup is far more fragile. Like the Warby Parker crew, the entrepreneurs whose companies topped Fast Company’s recent most innovative lists typically stayed in their day jobs even after they launched. Former track star Phil Knight started selling running shoes out of the trunk of his car in 1964, yet kept working as an accountant until 1969. After inventing the original Apple I computer, Steve Wozniak started the company with Steve Jobs in 1976 but continued working full time in his engineering job at Hewlett-Packard until 1977. And although Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin figured out how to dramatically improve internet searches in 1996, they didn’t go on leave from their graduate studies at Stanford until 1998. “We almost didn’t start Google,” Page says, because we “were too worried about dropping out of our Ph.D. program.” In 1997, concerned that their fledgling search engine was distracting them from their research, they tried to sell Google for less than $2 million in cash and stock. Luckily for them, the potential buyer rejected the offer. This habit of keeping one’s day job isn’t limited to successful entrepreneurs. Many influential creative minds have stayed in full-time employment or education even after earning income from major projects. Selma director Ava DuVernay made her first three films while working in her day job as a publicist, only pursuing filmmaking full time after working at it for four years and winning multiple awards. Brian May was in the middle of doctoral studies in astrophysics when he started playing guitar in a new band, but he didn’t drop out until several years later to go all in with Queen. Soon thereafter he wrote “We Will Rock You.” Grammy winner John Legend released his first album in 2000 but kept working as a management consultant until 2002, preparing PowerPoint presentations by day while performing at night. Thriller master Stephen King worked as a teacher, janitor, and gas station attendant for seven years after writing his first story, only quitting a year after his first novel, Carrie, was published. Dilbert author Scott Adams worked at Pacific Bell for seven years after his first comic strip hit newspapers. Why did all these originals play it safe instead of risking it all?

The perfect target market for a startup is a small group of particular people concentrated together and served by few or no competitors. Any big market is a bad choice, and a big market already served by competing companies is even worse. This is why it’s always a red flag when entrepreneurs talk about getting 1% of a $100 billion market. In practice, a large market will either lack a good starting point or it will be open to competition, so it’s hard to ever reach that 1%. And even if you do succeed in gaining a small foothold, you’ll have to be satisfied with keeping the lights on: cutthroat competition means your profits will be zero.

While a 10x improvement is gargantuan, Teller has very specific reasons for aiming exactly that high. “You assume that going 10x bigger is going to be ten times harder,” he continues, “but often it’s literally easier to go bigger. Why should that be? It doesn’t feel intuitively right. But if you choose to make something 10 percent better, you are almost by definition signing up for the status quo—and trying to make it a little bit better. That means you start from the status quo, with all its existing assumptions, locked into the tools, technologies, and processes that you’re going to try to slightly improve. It means you’re putting yourself and your people into a smartness contest with everyone else in the world. Statistically, no matter the resources available, you’re not going to win. But if you sign up for moonshot thinking, if you sign up to make something 10x better, there is no chance of doing that with existing assumptions. You’re going to have to throw out the rule book. You’re going to have to perspective-shift and supplant all that smartness and resources with bravery and creativity.” This perspective shift is key. It encourages risk taking and enhances creativity while simultaneously guarding against the inevitable decline. Teller explains: “Even if you think you’re going to go ten times bigger, reality will eat into your 10x. It always does. There will be things that will be more expensive, some that are slower; others that you didn’t think were competitive will become competitive. If you shoot for 10x, you might only be at 2x by the time you’re done. But 2x is still amazing. On the other hand, if you only shoot for 2x [i.e., 200 percent], you’re only going to get 5 percent and it’s going to cost you the perspective shift that comes from aiming bigger.” Most critically here, this 10x strategy doesn’t hold true just for large corporations. “A start-up is simply a skunk works without the big company around it,” says Teller. “The upside is there’s no Borg to get sucked back into; the downside is you have no money. But that’s not a reason not to go after moonshots. I think the opposite is true. If you publicly state your big goal, if you vocally commit yourself to making more progress than is actually possible using normal methods, there’s no way back. In one fell swoop you’ve severed all ties between yourself and all the expert assumptions.” Thus entrepreneurs, by striving for truly huge goals, are tapping into the same creativity accelerant that Google uses to achieve such goals. That said, by itself, a willingness to take bigger risks

Still, when it comes to careers, instead of searching for the job where we’ll be happiest, we might be better off pursuing the job where we expect to learn and contribute the most. Psychologists find that passions are often developed, not discovered. In a study of entrepreneurs, the more effort they put into their startups, the more their enthusiasm about their businesses climbed each week. Their passion grew as they gained momentum and mastery. Interest doesn’t always lead to effort and skill; sometimes it follows them. By investing in learning and problem solving, we can develop our passions—and build the skills necessary to do the work and lead the lives we find worthwhile.

a young Goldman Sachs banker named Joseph Park was sitting in his apartment, frustrated at the effort required to get access to entertainment. Why should he trek all the way to Blockbuster to rent a movie? He should just be able to open a website, pick out a movie, and have it delivered to his door. Despite raising around $250 million, Kozmo, the company Park founded, went bankrupt in 2001. His biggest mistake was making a brash promise for one-hour delivery of virtually anything, and investing in building national operations to support growth that never happened. One study of over three thousand startups indicates that roughly three out of every four fail because of premature scaling—making investments that the market isn’t yet ready to support. Had Park proceeded more slowly, he might have noticed that with the current technology available, one-hour delivery was an impractical and low-margin business. There was, however, a tremendous demand for online movie rentals. Netflix was just then getting off the ground, and Kozmo might have been able to compete in the area of mail-order rentals and then online movie streaming. Later, he might have been able to capitalize on technological changes that made it possible for Instacart to build a logistics operation that made one-hour grocery delivery scalable and profitable. Since the market is more defined when settlers enter, they can focus on providing superior quality instead of deliberating about what to offer in the first place. “Wouldn’t you rather be second or third and see how the guy in first did, and then . . . improve it?” Malcolm Gladwell asked in an interview. “When ideas get really complicated, and when the world gets complicated, it’s foolish to think the person who’s first can work it all out,” Gladwell remarked. “Most good things, it takes a long time to figure them out.”* Second, there’s reason to believe that the kinds of people who choose to be late movers may be better suited to succeed. Risk seekers are drawn to being first, and they’re prone to making impulsive decisions. Meanwhile, more risk-averse entrepreneurs watch from the sidelines, waiting for the right opportunity and balancing their risk portfolios before entering. In a study of software startups, strategy researchers Elizabeth Pontikes and William Barnett find that when entrepreneurs rush to follow the crowd into hyped markets, their startups are less likely to survive and grow. When entrepreneurs wait for the market to cool down, they have higher odds of success: “Nonconformists . . . that buck the trend are most likely to stay in the market, receive funding, and ultimately go public.” Third, along with being less recklessly ambitious, settlers can improve upon competitors’ technology to make products better. When you’re the first to market, you have to make all the mistakes yourself. Meanwhile, settlers can watch and learn from your errors. “Moving first is a tactic, not a goal,” Peter Thiel writes in Zero to One; “being the first mover doesn’t do you any good if someone else comes along and unseats you.” Fourth, whereas pioneers tend to get stuck in their early offerings, settlers can observe market changes and shifting consumer tastes and adjust accordingly. In a study of the U.S. automobile industry over nearly a century, pioneers had lower survival rates because they struggled to establish legitimacy, developed routines that didn’t fit the market, and became obsolete as consumer needs clarified. Settlers also have the luxury of waiting for the market to be ready. When Warby Parker launched, e-commerce companies had been thriving for more than a decade, though other companies had tried selling glasses online with little success. “There’s no way it would have worked before,” Neil Blumenthal tells me. “We had to wait for Amazon, Zappos, and Blue Nile to get people comfortable buying products they typically wouldn’t order online.