Startup Business Motivation Quotes

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

Fail soon so that you can succeed sooner.

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

Today it is cheaper to start a business than tomorrow.

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

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

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.

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

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

When you were making excuses someone else was making enterprise.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your energy is a valuable resource, distribute it wisely.

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

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.

Success doesn't teach as many lessons as failure

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Selling is a sacred trust between buyer and seller.

A free and open Internet is a despot's worst enemy.

Be the best at what you do or the only one doing it.

A disruptor finds opportunity and profit from his misfortunes.

There is a difference between failing and failure. Failing is trying something that you learn doesn't work. Failure is throwing in the towel and giving up.

Our world's future is far more malleable and controllable than most people realize.

A negative mind will never find success. I have never heard a positive idea come from a person in a negative state.

A dream with a deadline is a goal.

Accepting that the odds are against you is the same as accepting defeat before you begin.

A career is just a longer trip with a whole lot more baggage.

You will have more regrets for the things you didn't try than the ones you tried and didn't succeed at.

An average idea enthusiastically embraced will go farther than a genius idea no one gets.

Problems are just businesses waiting for the right entrepreneur to unlock the value.

Smart entrepreneurs learn that they must fail often and fast.

Data may disappoint, but it never lies.

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

Would you rather work forty hours a week at a job you hate or eighty hours a week doing work you love?

Most startup failures result from entrepreneurs who are better at making excuses than products.

Data has no ego and makes an excellent co-pilot.

Be patient. Creating something good takes time. So take your time.

QUIT = Quickly Uphold Important Things

You NEED to learn how to fly before you learn how to land and you MUST learn how to land before you start flying.

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

You may start small but don't stay small

The best big idea is only going to be as good as its implementation.

Building a career or a company is about living a few years of your life like most people won't so that you can spend the rest of your life living at a level most people can't.

Corporate planning cycles are a classic example of generals fighting the last war over again instead of preparing for what might lie ahead.

If you can imagine a solution, you can make it happen.

Those that recognize the inevitability of change stand to benefit the most from it.

The customer is always right...even when they're wrong.

The joy of disruption comes from accepting that we all live in a temporal state.

The most successful people have the same twenty-four hours in a day that you do.

If you don't know where you want to be in five years, how do you ever expect to get there?

You can truly have it all, just not all at the same time.

Plan for ways to get more enjoyment into your life and you will get more joy out of it.

Whether driven by ambition or circumstance, every career gets disrupted.

Security doesn't rob ambition; the illusion of security robs ambition.

Disruption isn't about what happens to you, it's about how you respond to what happens to you.

There are riches to be found simply by capturing the value released through others' disruptive breakthroughs.

There are two types of people in this world: those whose look for opportunity and those who make it happen.

If life, you get what you believe you deserve.

The business world is littered with the fossils of companies that failed to evolve. Disrupt or be disrupted. There is no middle ground.

Billions of dollars worth of research knowledge lie dormant at American universities waiting for the right disruptor to come along and create a business.

All Disruption starts with introspection.

Entrepreneurs don’t ask for permission. They act per a mission.

In life, you get what you believe you deserve.

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.

A business model describes the flow between key components of the company: •  value proposition, which the company offers (product/service, benefits) •  customer segments, such as users, and payers, or moms or teens •  distribution channels to reach customers and offer them the value proposition •  customer relationships to create demand •  revenue streams generated by the value proposition(s) •  resources needed to make the business model possible •  activities necessary to implement the business model •  partners who participate in the business and their motivations for doing so •  cost structure resulting from the business model The

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!

Everywhere you look with this young lady, there’s a purity of motivation,” Shultz told him. “I mean she really is trying to make the world better, and this is her way of doing it.” Mattis went out of his way to praise her integrity. “She has probably one of the most mature and well-honed sense of ethics—personal ethics, managerial ethics, business ethics, medical ethics that I’ve ever heard articulated,” the retired general gushed. Parloff didn’t end up using those quotes in his article, but the ringing endorsements he heard in interview after interview from the luminaries on Theranos’s board gave him confidence that Elizabeth was the real deal. He also liked to think of himself as a pretty good judge of character. After all, he’d dealt with his share of dishonest people over the years, having worked in a prison during law school and later writing at length about such fraudsters as the carpet-cleaning entrepreneur Barry Minkow and the lawyer Marc Dreier, both of whom went to prison for masterminding Ponzi schemes. Sure, Elizabeth had a secretive streak when it came to discussing certain specifics about her company, but he found her for the most part to be genuine and sincere. Since his angle was no longer the patent case, he didn’t bother to reach out to the Fuiszes. — WHEN PARLOFF’S COVER STORY was published in the June 12, 2014, issue of Fortune, it vaulted Elizabeth to instant stardom. Her Journal interview had gotten some notice and there had also been a piece in Wired, but there was nothing like a magazine cover to grab people’s attention. Especially when that cover featured an attractive young woman wearing a black turtleneck, dark mascara around her piercing blue eyes, and bright red lipstick next to the catchy headline “THIS CEO IS OUT FOR BLOOD.” The story disclosed Theranos’s valuation for the first time as well as the fact that Elizabeth owned more than half of the company. There was also the now-familiar comparison to Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. This time it came not from George Shultz but from her old Stanford professor Channing Robertson. (Had Parloff read Robertson’s testimony in the Fuisz trial, he would have learned that Theranos was paying him $500,000 a year, ostensibly as a consultant.) Parloff also included a passage about Elizabeth’s phobia of needles—a detail that would be repeated over and over in the ensuing flurry of coverage his story unleashed and become central to her myth. When the editors at Forbes saw the Fortune article, they immediately assigned reporters to confirm the company’s valuation and the size of Elizabeth’s ownership stake and ran a story about her in their next issue. Under the headline “Bloody Amazing,” the article pronounced her “the youngest woman to become a self-made billionaire.” Two months later, she graced one of the covers of the magazine’s annual Forbes 400 issue on the richest people in America. More fawning stories followed in USA Today, Inc., Fast Company, and Glamour, along with segments on NPR, Fox Business, CNBC, CNN, and CBS News. With the explosion of media coverage came invitations to numerous conferences and a cascade of accolades. Elizabeth became the youngest person to win the Horatio Alger Award. Time magazine named her one of the one hundred most influential people in the world. President Obama appointed her a U.S. ambassador for global entrepreneurship, and Harvard Medical School invited her to join its prestigious board of fellows.

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

Craig Newmark simply started e-mailing his friends about local events in 1995; almost twenty-two years later, network effects have kept Craigslist a dominant player in online classifieds despite operating with a skeleton crew and making seemingly no changes to the website design during that entire period! This is where an emphasis on speed also plays an important role. Because Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurs focus on designing business models that can get big fast, they are more likely to incorporate network effects. And because the fierce local competition forces start-ups to grow so aggressively (i.e., blitzscale), Silicon Valley start-ups are more likely to reach the tipping point of network effects before start-ups from less aggressive geographies. One of the motivations for this book is to help entrepreneurs from around the world emulate these successes by teaching them how to systematically design their businesses for blitzscaling. When you design your business model to leverage network effects, you can succeed anywhere.

The key difference in this early stage of innovation is not to just ask customers what they want but to deeply understand the customers—their motivations, their needs, and most important, the job they are trying to get done.

I don’t want to be the smartest person in my circle. I don’t want to be the most creative person in my circle. I don’t want to be the most knowledgeable person in my circle. I don’t want to be the only one that’s NOT afraid to use their voice in my circle. I don’t want to be the only one that’s fearless and unapologetic in my circle. I, personally, am not intimidated by another person’s gifts, talents, or skills. I love to build genuine relationships with like-minded people that inspire, motivate, and empower me, too!

Everywhere you look with this young lady, there’s a purity of motivation,” Shultz told him. “I mean she really is trying to make the world better, and this is her way of doing it.” Mattis went out of his way to praise her integrity. “She has probably one of the most mature and well-honed sense of ethics—personal ethics, managerial ethics, business ethics, medical ethics that I’ve ever heard articulated,” the retired general gushed.

Dr. Mayo echoed precisely that point, saying: “It means delegating, entrusting, giving up a degree of ownership and control—it’s tough to do, you have to work on your own ego—it’s not ‘my event’ anymore.” Her mentors advised the flattening of the organization and sharing of responsibilities, she recalls, “so as to improve teamwork and motivation.” She noted that “There are now five people ready to take my position—there are shared decisions and attention. That is because we let others feel they could make a decision.” This is good because Dr. Mayo said she is in “a process of detachment” and now is “looking for ways to make it [CASP] truly self-sustainable financially.

Chase the needs, and you are halfway to entrepreneurship.

There are superpowers to being bootstrapped. One is that you don’t need anyone’s permission to start or build your company. Another is that your business doesn’t die until you quit. Bootstrappers don’t run out of money; they run out of motivation.

This is the pattern: poor quantitative results force us to declare failure and create the motivation, context, and space for more qualitative research. These investigations produce new ideas—new hypotheses—to be tested, leading to a possible pivot. Each pivot unlocks new opportunities for further experimentation, and the cycle repeats. Each time we repeat this simple rhythm: establish the baseline, tune the engine, and make a decision to pivot or persevere.

Your business and finance mentor helping you achieve success with business, finance, and real estate solutions. Small business startup, small business funding, real estate investment. Dare to think and act differently from the majority and you will be amazed at what you can accomplish. Join me on my journey to achieve success and let me help begin your journey. By sharing my experience, allow me to motivate you to understand there are other options available and you don't have to do what everyone else is doing. By sharing my tips, let me guide you down the road less traveled where opportunities are abundant. You can follow your dreams and you can make them come true!

Remove this quote from your collection “Humans are born to build something outrageous.

Disruption causes vast sums of money to flow from existing businesses and business models to new entrants.

Crowdsourcing is the ultimate disruptor of distribution because in a most Zen-like fashion, the content is controlled by everyone and no one at the same time.

The power of crowd sourcing always remains with the crowd, not the technological implementation.

Self-disruption is akin to undergoing major surgery, but you are the one holding the scalpel.

CEOs will gladly overpay for a company if the acquisition enables them to keep their jobs.

There is something in the success of a new venture that correlates with the motivations of the entrepreneurs. From the outset, most successful entrepreneurs know they are creating businesses that will define their lives—and not just by how much money they might make. Without this intense personal connection to the idea behind the company, a startup founder will have a hard time summoning the persistence necessary to plow through the inevitable rough patches. And persistence, we know, is one of the hallmarks of successful entrepreneurs.

Cosgn co-signs your startup journey, empowering you to grow and pay it forward.

Partnering with start-up incubators offers students hands-on experience in entrepreneurship, innovation, and business development, empowering them to turn their ideas into viable ventures and make a meaningful impact in the world.

Getting through Burnout I’ve heard burnout manifests itself differently in different people, but for me it felt like a mix of depression and frustration. Not the kind you can clear up with a weekend away, but a long-term, deep sense of tiredness, lack of motivation, and feeling just a little pissed off at all times. This led to my aforementioned stints of staring at Trello for hours and a lack of presence at home. I would be home with the family, but most of the time my mind was elsewhere. I tell this as a cautionary tale: if you find yourself listless, unmotivated, or constantly frustrated as you endure the stress of building your company, it’s unlikely to fix itself. The best remedy for burnout is significantly changing your habits and patterns related to work, including stepping away for weeks, which feels like the last thing you can do when everything is going crazy (whether it’s good crazy or bad crazy). If you find yourself in this situation, you need to address it, or it will get worse. If unaddressed, burnout can lead to terrible outcomes, including long-term damage to your brain. If burnout is a situation you find yourself in, consider reaching out to a professional who works with founders on the mental game of entrepreneurship. Dr. Sherry Walling is one (she happens to be my wife, and she knows her stuff), but there are many other executive coaches and therapists who work with high-performing individuals to manage stress, burnout, and everything else that comes with our line of work. I’ve only started to touch on burnout here, but for an entire chapter about it, check out my third book: The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Keeping Your Sh*t Together: How to Run Your Business Without Letting it Run You.

The first time you make a sale in a new business, no matter the amount, it's a very big deal.

Silicon Valley’s and China’s internet ecosystems grew out of very different cultural soil. Entrepreneurs in the valley are often the children of successful professionals, such as computer scientists, dentists, engineers, and academics. Growing up they were constantly told that they—yes, they in particular—could change the world. Their undergraduate years were spent learning the art of coding from the world’s leading researchers but also basking in the philosophical debates of a liberal arts education. When they arrived in Silicon Valley, their commutes to and from work took them through the gently curving, tree-lined streets of suburban California. It’s an environment of abundance that lends itself to lofty thinking, to envisioning elegant technical solutions to abstract problems. 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. 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.

Business ideas are like human reproduction – they never cease to be birthed as long as there is constant interaction between the brain and questions of life.