Startup Entrepreneur 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 must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want.

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.

Society flourishes when people think entrepreneurally.

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

When in doubt, simplify.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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?

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

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

Rebels revel in rewriting reality's restrictions.

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

Peter Drucker said, “There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.”2

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Sell the results, not the nuts and bolts.

Failure is a prerequisite to learning.

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.

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

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

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

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.

When you were making excuses someone else was making enterprise.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Success doesn't teach as many lessons as failure

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.