Entrepreneurial Journey Quotes

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

When we love something, emotion often drives our actions. This is the gift and the challenge entrepreneurs face every day. The companies we dream of and build from scratch are part of us and intensely personal. They are our families. Our lives. But the entrepreneurial journey is not for everyone. Yes, the highs are high and the rewards can be thrilling. But the lows can break your heart. Entrepreneurs must love what they do to such a degree that doing it is worth sacrifice and, at times, pain. But doing anything else, we think, would be unimaginable

As I would learn later on, developed countries will always welcome the Einsteins of this world -- those individuals whose talents are already recognized and deemed to have value. This welcome doesn't usually extend to the poor and uneducated people seeking to enter the country. But the truth, supported by the facts of history and the richness of immigrant contribution to America's distinction in the world, is that the most entrepreneurial, innovative, motivated citizen is the one who has been given an opportunity and wants to repay the debt.

Every single part of our entrepreneurial journey will begin as an idea that will only become reality when we show up and bring it into the world.

I am too busy working on my own grass to notice if yours is greener.

If everyone is thinking alike,’ General George Patton said, ‘then somebody isn’t thinking.

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.

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

Remember, mindset is the #1 most important thing as you start your entrepreneurial journey, and it will continue to guide you the entire way.

Managing your small failures (iterations) and major failures (pivots) as part of the entrepreneurial development process to save you from a fatal failure that has been the hallmark of most entrepreneurial journeys.

We think of agents, traffickers and facilitators as the worst abusers of refugees, but when they set out to extort from their clients, when they cheat them or dispatch them to their deaths, they are only enacting an entrepreneurial version of the disdain which refugees suffer at the hands of far more powerful enemies – those who terrorise them and those who are determined to keep them at arm’s length. Human traffickers are simply vectors of the contempt which exists at the two poles of the asylum seeker’s journey; they take their cue from the attitudes of warlords and dictators, on the one hand, and, on the other, of wealthy states whose citizens have learned to think of generosity as a vice. [from the London Review of Books Vol. 22 No. 3 · 3 February 2000]

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

16,000. That’s how many words the average human speaks a day.

General George Patton once said, ‘No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won by making the other dumb bastard die for his.

Entrepreneurship is a journey, not an outing.

Don't be afraid to step into the spotlight! Your time to shine will be determined by you!

Entrepreneurship is a journey, not an outing. You cannot make a deal with yourself by saying, ‘I’m going to try this out for two years and see.’ Entrepreneurship is about living life on your own terms. Dream huge. And when you do, dream with your eyes open.

Communication is a form of currency. And how you choose to use it—the speed at which you understand things, your clarity of thought, and your ability to deliver a strong message, so the audience has no doubt who is leading the show—can boost or burn your business.

There is one last way to break with your past and begin a new stage of your career journey, which is to take some advice that appears at the end of the 1964 film Zorba the Greek. Zorba, the great lover of life, is sitting on the beach with the repressed and bookish Basil, an Englishman who has come to a tiny Greek island with the hope of setting up a small business. The elaborate cable system that Zorba has designed and built for Basil to bring logs down the mountainside has just collapsed on its very first trial. Their whole entrepreneurial venture is in complete ruins, a failure before it has even begun. And that is the moment when Zorba unveils his philosophy of life to Basil: ZORBA: Damn it boss, I like you too much not to say it. You’ve got everything except one thing: madness! A man needs a little madness, or else… BASIL: Or else? ZORBA:…he never dares cut the rope and be free. Basil then stands up and, completely out of character, asks Zorba to teach him how to dance. The Englishman has finally learned that life is there to be lived with passion, that risks are there to be taken, the day is there to be seized. To do otherwise is a disservice to life itself. Zorba’s words are one of the great messages for the human quest in search of the good life. Most of us live bound by our fears and inhibitions. Yet if we are to move beyond them, if we are to cut the rope and be free, we need to treat life as an experiment and discover the little bit of madness that lies within us all.

The mistake they make grows partly out of their tendency to regard the exit as simply an event, and a relatively distant one at that. But the exit is actually a critical phase of a business owner’s journey and an integral part of the entrepreneurial experience. “It’s like passing the 26.2-mile mark of a marathon, or crossing home plate after a home run,

Dreaming with your eyes open means being alert to challenges but refusing to let them stop you.

Culture is the lifeblood of successful endeavours. Everything you do and everywhere you go creates opportunities to communicate in impactful ways. Great communication becomes a part of a company’s culture. The more deeply it’s embedded, the larger the company grows. The larger the company grows, the deeper the culture.

your focus on creating a brand is a critical step on the journey to scale. This is not an easy task, and far more complex than the common view would have it—that brand-building requires little more than spending on marketing. But once you create a brand that stands for something, speaks of its own standards, has recall value with a large consumer base and brings credibility to your service or product, it can be a great inflection point for your company.

To sell the concept of cable TV, we set up hundreds of demos in building lobbies across the city, bringing residents their first taste of technology and choice in content. Over the next twelve months, we did over 1,000 demos and more than 3,000 door-to-door visits before we got our first connection.

As a professional, a leader or an entrepreneur, there will be times in your career when you’ll be an outsider, either because you have changed sectors or jobs, or started a new business where full domain knowledge is not your core strength. Embrace this status, be a quick learner and an even sharper listener. ♦ Build a team that complements yet challenges you, and hones your skill sets, and get them aligned with the big picture sooner rather than later. ♦ I’m often asked about the keys to success as an outsider. The irony, I say, is that the raw material for any entrepreneur or leader to make an impact as an outsider comes from within. It’s a lesson I have learnt and relearnt every day in the two decades I spent in the media and entertainment business.

Research and homework are vital, but deep knowledge comes from doing, from getting your hands dirty and from asking the questions others are too afraid or embarrassed to ask.

Risk isn’t about going headlong into situations where the outcome can’t be predicted. That’s just foolish behaviour. Risk means pushing the envelope when others want to take the safe route. Risk means caring more about potential rewards than possible losses. To separate yourself from the crowd, think through the worst-case scenarios as possibilities. If a worst-case scenario does become a reality, be just as willing to move on to bigger and better things.

All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts…

The difference between predator and prey in a business ecosystem is determined by the strength of one’s next idea.

Nothing stops the great from being greater and so was with Tulga Demir, born in Germany, who started his entrepreneurial journey at the young age of 17 in the USA.

Risk isn’t about rushing headlong into uncertain situations. That’s just foolish behaviour. Risk means pushing the envelope when others want to take the safe route, and caring more about potential rewards than possible losses.

Failure never stopped anybody who didn’t want to be stopped.

The only question you need to answer is: When I fail, how will I respond?

Fear and uncertainty, when things are not going as planned, are natural, but this is also when your convictions are truly tested. Generally, the difference between success and failure is about staying the course.

Life moves on. We tend to duck the unpopular, hard decisions, not realizing that eventually when the results are out, we’re not going to be popular anyway.

Team-building is critical at all times, but even more so when you’re not involved hands-on. Not everyone you bring on board will perform at peak capacity from day one, some take a while to get into their roles. But as a leader, you need to give each individual a clear mandate, the freedom to operate and make mistakes, and unstinted support. Treat your team members like colleagues and not employees. Then watch them shine. I say this not because it’s a great HR exercise, but because that’s the reality guiding a successful business.

If you are coming along with me as a brother,friend, girlfriend, wife, business partner or even mentor, beware of the fact that,"I am a struggle still now, will be continuing till my death i.e. Entrepreneurial Journey which I started 10 years back.

If you are coming along with me as a brother,friend, girlfriend, wife, business partner or even mentor, beware of the fact that,"I am a struggler still now, will be continuing till my death i.e. Entrepreneurial Journey which I started 10 years back.

Entrepreneurship in a nutshell: action and reaction; understanding, confronting and transcending fear; working, disrupting and succeeding; trying and failing. And then laughing about it all later, while absorbing lasting life lessons.

What You Learn...Is What You Earn.

Your success is limited to how big or small you think...Think Global to go Global.

Five years from now, though, do you want to be doing exactly what you’re doing today? Most

In the 1970s, Mumbai (then Bombay) was a whirl of motion, noise and colour. A million kirana stores lined the streets (this hasn’t changed much), with honking Ambassador cars, trolley buses and autos jockeying with cycles for space on the narrow roads. There was music, art, literature. People with big ideas and hopes for the future. Then, as now, the city was a crucible for a young entrepreneur with a dream. As a boy, I soaked in every aspect of vibrant Mumbai like my life depended on it. Back then, India was much more a manufacturing and agricultural economy, and I paid special attention to the economics of business—how family businesses

My childhood at Grant Road, next to Novelty Cinema, was lower-middle-class—we weren’t wealthy, but we had what we needed. We lived in an apartment situated on the first floor of the five-storey Arsiwalla building, nearly a century old and in constant need of repair. It had one long corridor with three rooms that held my brother, parents, two aunts and grandparents. The apartment’s sleeping area was indistinguishable from its other rooms. I recall begging family members to switch with me so their bedroom could become the de facto living room for a while. I lived there until the age of sixteen, privileged enough to go to a school where most of my classmates came in cars while I waited forty-five minutes for the B.E.S.T. bus to arrive.

David versus Goliath Asymmetry lies at the heart of network-based competition. The larger or smaller network will be at different stages of the Cold Start framework and, as such, will gravitate toward a different set of levers. The giant is often fighting gravitational pull as its network grows and saturates the market. To combat these negative forces, it must add new use cases, introduce the product to new audiences, all while making sure it’s generating a profit. The upstart, on the other hand, is trying to solve the Cold Start Problem, and often starts with a niche. A new startup has the luxury of placing less emphasis on profitability and might instead focus on top-line growth, subsidizing the market to grow its network. When they encounter each other in the market, it becomes natural that their competitive moves reflect their different goals and resources. Startups have fewer resources—capital, employees, distribution—but have important advantages in the context of building new networks: speed and a lack of sacred cows. A new startup looking to compete against Zoom might try a more specific use case, like events, and if that doesn’t work, they can quickly pivot and try something else, like corporate education classes. Startups like YouTube, Twitch, Twitter, and many other products have similar stories, and went through an incubation phase as the product was refined and an initial network was built. Trying and failing many times is part of the startup journey—it only takes the discovery of one atomic network to get into the market. With that, a startup is often able to start the next leg of the journey, often with more investment and resources to support them. Contrast that to a larger company, which has obvious advantages in resources, manpower, and existing product lines. But there are real disadvantages, too: it’s much harder to solve the Cold Start Problem with a slower pace of execution, risk aversion, and a “strategy tax” that requires new products to align to the existing business. Something seems to happen when companies grow to tens of thousands of employees—they inevitably create rigorous processes for everything, including planning cycles, performance reviews, and so on. This helps teams focus, but it also creates a harder environment for entrepreneurial risk-taking. I saw this firsthand at Uber, whose entrepreneurial culture shifted in its later years toward profitability and coordinating the efforts of tens of thousands. This made it much harder to start new initiatives—for better and worse. When David and Goliath meet in the market—and often it’s one Goliath and many investor-funded Davids at once—the resulting moves and countermoves are fascinating. Now that I have laid down some of the theoretical foundation for how competition fits into Cold Start Theory, let me describe and unpack some of the most powerful moves in the network-versus-network playbook.

Our mind has the power to heal us. When you can control your mind and develop a strong mindset, you can reinvent yourself, you can change, you can accomplish one dream after another, and improve your odds in overcoming tough times.

I learned that the most important thing about business was value: the ability to add value, to sell that value, to market that value and to put people together to deliver on that value.

The moment I started believing in my own capacities, I learned that I could not only fly but really soar and live the life I wanted.

I always work from a perspective of love and spirituality, as it always gets the best results.

My theory is that during these near-death events, you experience time in a different dimension. You’re also given a choice whether you want to continue to live or to die. I chose life each time.

Spending a lot of time developing your product does not mean you have a business. If you can’t repetitively sell your product or service, you don’t have a business.

Life is precious. Who has time to be down and out when your tomorrows are not guaranteed? I didn’t give any time to disempowering feelings anymore. I had confronted my very survival and felt a deep sense of my insignificance and yet was ready to live life to the fullest.

Hanging on to disempowering worldviews kept people stuck in their comfort zones.

Facing my mortality put me at peace with my life. I became more receptive to life; I became clearer about what my higher purpose was and accomplished anything I set my mind to.

Simon Doiban is a name that is synonymous with the beauty industry. As a serial entrepreneur, Doiban has made a name for himself by launching and scaling successful beauty businesses. From his early beginnings in the industry to his current role as a beauty industry advisor, Doiban has demonstrated an innovative and entrepreneurial spirit that has enabled him to succeed in a highly competitive market. Doiban’s journey in Miami in the beauty industry began when he launched his first beauty startup, a Beauty Spa with updated technology. The startup was an instant hit and quickly gained a large following. However, Doiban was not content with just one successful business. He went on to launch several other beauty startups, each one building on the success of the previous one. Following the example of the first business, he launch a second location of the Beauty Spa in one of the most concurrent zones in Miami, Brickell City Center. This marked the beginning of Doiban’s career as a serial entrepreneur in the beauty industry in Miami Area. Over the years, Doiban has launched and scaled several other beauty startups, each one building on the success of the previous one. His latest venture is a beauty consulting academy. The company has been praised for its innovative approach to beauty and has already gained a large following. Doiban’s success in the beauty industry can be attributed to his entrepreneurial spirit and his willingness to take risks. He has a deep understanding of the beauty market and has been able to identify gaps in the market that he can fill with his innovative products and services. He has also been able to build a loyal following of customers who trust his brand and appreciate the high-quality products that he provides. In conclusion, Simon Doiban is a serial entrepreneur who has made a name for himself in the beauty industry. His innovative and entrepreneurial spirit has enabled him to launch and scale successful beauty businesses, and his latest venture is set to revolutionize the beauty industry even further. As the beauty industry continues to evolve, it will be exciting to see what Doiban has in store for us next.

The audacity of Elon Musk to ask for $100,000 to reserve a yet‐to‐be built Roadster, or a more modest sum for a new Model 3. The courage of John Erceg to keep spending every spare euro to buy more AdWords. The personal conviction of both that they were on sound paths. The trust that Jay Gupta built with his suppliers. The self‐belief of all three that, in the end, they would do what it takes to survive and succeed, no matter the prior odds. It's your own personal attributes—your mindset—that make this kind of “ask for the cash” funding possible. These attributes—audacity, courage, trustworthiness, faith in oneself—are not part of everyone's personality, to be sure. Setting forth on an entrepreneurial path, whether from your garage or within an established business, is not for everyone, either. But if the entrepreneurial path is one you wish to pursue, in one way or another, there's no better or more hospitable way to finance your journey than by finding a need that's so compelling for your customers that they'll pay you up front, and finding suppliers that will take payment later, if only because they trust you and they believe you'll bring value to their business, too.

There’s a time and a place for confidence, but your army (confidence) can’t march too far forward of your supply lines (expertise) or you’ll be caught without what you’ll need in order to win the war. There’s a healthy stretching that always pulls you forward, but you have to know enough about your field of impact. Crafting a positioning should tend toward the honest and boring side of this balance. Start by detailing your successful experience, and you can define that in two ways. As you list these instances, concentrate where you’ve been effective on behalf of a client and also made money yourself. I suppose you could add the element of where you’ve enjoyed the work, too, but the truth is that you’re not likely to even list these instances unless that happens to be true. So concentrate on impact and revenue. Eliminate any where both weren’t true. Don’t worry too much about recency, either. Prospects aren’t going to write you off if a particular demonstration of your expertise is more than three years old, for instance. They don’t look that deeply at the claims you make, and you, the expert, are far tougher on yourself than they will be. As we talked about in Foundation Chapter B, you’re attempting to craft a positioning where you are less interchangeable so that withholding your expertise carries some meaning. Think of the options as a spectrum, with the right side depicting a completely undifferentiated firm (I’m an accountant) and the left side depicting the most focused firm you could imagine (I’m an accountant who works with U.S.-based multi-location casual dining brands). At the beginning of this exercise, you are toward the right, wanting to move toward the left and be more differentiated than you are now. You’re aiming for fewer competitors so that your expertise supports a price premium in your work. As you march from right to left, you want to make a complete journey and make really smart positioning decisions. As you work out the intricacies of the positioning journey, there are two forces that slow your progress: one good and one bad.

Melanie and her partners did not start their entrepreneurial journey knowing everything they needed to know. Nor should they have. When you have an idea that you want to make the foundation of your company, you can’t afford to spend twenty years prepping for the job you want one day. By the time you’re ready to start, someone else has long since taken your idea and run with it.

In most entrepreneurial companies, the urgent is the enemy of the important. Leaders get sucked into the day-to-day, distracted by daily tasks and countless interruptions. The stuff that really matters to the organization keeps getting pushed off. Ultimately, you’re all staring at a growing list of twenty to thirty priorities and falling further and further behind.

Here are some tips on finding a mentor: 1. Identify who could be a good mentor for you. Remember, you don’t need to aim too high; somebody simply a couple of years ahead of you on their journey might be enough. 2. Get their attention ‒ break through the noise. These people receive huge numbers of messages asking for help and advice, and offers to meet for lunch or coffee so that their brains can be picked. Naturally, they put most of these long emails (they’re often really long) straight in the junk folder to protect the most valuable thing for them ‒ their time. Bear that in mind. To break through the noise, you need to be straight to the point and you need to do Step 3… 3. Seek to add value. Just because potential mentors are successful or higher status, this doesn’t mean you can’t add value to them. Have faith that you have some way of helping them. Study what they’re doing. Are they involved in any philanthropy or social impact causes? How can you help? That’s a great way to get their attention. 4. Act normal. This applies wherever there’s an imbalance of status. For example, when you meet somebody that you’re interested in romantically, and you feel as if they’re probably ‘out of your league, you have to not let that make you behave strangely. If you are too deferential, too reverent, and basically tripping over yourself to do stuff for them because you perceive them to be on another level, then they are unlikely to feel attracted to you. And conversely, sometimes acting ‘not normal’ means you go the other way, and behave like a schoolboy pulling the pigtails of the girl he fancies, going too far in overcompensating. Again, that is not good. Be pleasant to be around. 5. Apply what your mentor advises you to do as quickly as possible, then immediately feedback to them on the outcome of the action. This feedback loop will generate and strengthen the mentor-mentee relationship in the fastest possible way, because entrepreneurial mentors love coachable people who take action. And they feel more and more responsibility when they’re the ones directing your action and you’re coming back to them to report what happened. It’s like an interesting and fun game for them, and they want to know that they’re helping you in a tangible way. Be coachable.

These principles, however, can be equally applied to redefine competition on a smaller scale, allowing firms and entrepreneurs to create new positions and new market entry possibilities for themselves, without necessarily overturning the game board for others. Oprah Winfrey’s entrepreneurial journey is, consistent with her brand, a beautiful illustration that you don’t have to destroy to disrupt.

If you’re willing to hope that things will get better in the future, then you might as well even go so far as to believe that the best is yet to come.

The path that Wallace followed was an accelerated version of a three-phase journey that awaits most founders as they try to bounce back from their venture’s failure. The first phase is recovery from the emotional battering that the shutdown inflicts. The founder must cope with the grief, depression, anger, and guilt that can accompany any major personal setback—often, as with Wallace, while confronting the stark reality of having no income or personal savings. During the second phase, reflection, the founder ideally moves beyond blaming the failure on others or on uncontrollable external events. Through introspection, she gains a deeper understanding of what went wrong, what role she played in her venture’s demise, and what she might have done differently. In the process, she also gains new insights about her motivations and her strengths and weaknesses as an entrepreneur, manager, and leader. In the final phase, reentry, the founder leverages these insights to decide whether to pursue another startup or choose a different career track.

So it’s refreshing (and disappointingly rare) when someone actually listens and waits for others to finish, and crafts an intelligent, thoughtful response based on what had just been conveyed. It makes people feel respected. This guy is really listening because he has noted all the small points and has come back on them.

failure can be a stronger motivator than success.

Insulating yourself against failure doesn’t ensure success; it only makes success more elusive. Plan for failure. Embrace failure. Tomorrow will still be there, no matter how dire today feels.

You don’t have to be the fastest wildebeest to survive. You just never want to be the slowest.

Being entrepreneurial means you will fail. You just have to be willing to listen to people who tell you something is broken, and then fix it.

So many of us are hungry to restore a collective sense of pride in our nation. And we have what it takes to do so. Yet many people have become numb, even accepting, to the shockingly cruel rhetoric we sometimes hear from our neighbors and leaders. But we should remember there are more Americans who speak out against intolerance than those who spew it. Just because anger and fear are louder than kindness and optimism does not mean that anger and fear must prevail, or define a new American identity. The negativity that streams through our media and social feeds is a false—or at least incomplete—narrative. Every time harsh Tweets dominate news cycles, we can remind ourselves of Mary Poole’s empathy in Montana, or the compassion of Rebecca Crowder in West Virginia, or Bryan Stevenson’s adamant calls for justice in our courts. Countless acts of dignity are unfolding offline, away from earshot, and they matter. We already have what it takes to rise above divisiveness and the vitriol of a hurtful few and steer the country toward an even better “us.” Not so we can be great again, but so we can become an even stronger, safer, more fair, prosperous, and inclusive version of ourselves. Those who champion common-sense problem solving, and there are legions of us, are eager to keep fixing, reinventing, improving. In these pages, I tried to amplify our existing potential to eclipse dysfunction by recounting Mark Pinsky’s collaborative spirit, for example, and Michael Crow’s innovative bent, and Brandon Dennison’s entrepreneurial gumption, and Dakota Keyes’ steadfast belief in her young students, and in herself. They are reminders that the misplaced priorities of President Trump and his administration do not represent the priorities of the majority of Americans. And while there are heroes who hold office, members of both parties, Democrats and Republicans, have been complicit in the fracturing of trust that has plagued our political system for years now. In fact, I believe that the American people as a whole are better than our current political class.