Startup Quotes

You never change your life until you step out of your comfort zone; change begins at the end of your comfort zone.

Be Brave and Take Risks: You need to have faith in yourself. Be brave and take risks. You don't have to have it all figured out to move forward.

Live the Life of Your Dreams When you start living the life of your dreams, there will always be obstacles, doubters, mistakes and setbacks along the way. But with hard work, perseverance and self-belief there is no limit to what you can achieve.

Don't wait for the right moment to start, start and make each moment right.

Stop doing what is easy. Start doing what is right.

Stop doing what is easy or popular. Start doing what is right.

You have to work on the business first before it works for you.

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

Maturity is when you stop complaining and making excuses in your life; you realize everything that happens in life is a result of the previous choice you’ve made and start making new choices to change your life.

The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else.

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.

You need to have faith in yourself. Be brave and take risks. You don't have to have it all figured out to move forward.

What important truth do very few people agree with you on?

Real change is difficult at the beginning, but gorgeous at the end. Change begins the moment you get the courage and step outside your comfort zone; change begins at the end of your comfort zone.

ZERO TO ONE EVERY MOMENT IN BUSINESS happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.

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.

The beginning is always NOW.

Monopoly is the condition of every successful business.

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

All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.

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

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

Tolstoy opens Anna Karenina by observing: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Business is the opposite. All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.

When you start seeing your product as your customer’s product and not as your product, you will start seeing all the missing gaps.

In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work (if this describes your company, you should quit now).

Maturity is when you stop complaining and making excuses in your life; you realize everything that happens in life is a result of the previous choice you’ve made and start making new choices to change your life.

Reading is good, action is better.

You should focus relentlessly on something you’re good at doing, but before that you must think hard about whether it will be valuable in the future.

Promise yourself to stop buying into people’s potential. You’re not a start-up investor.

Marc: “Do you know the best thing about startups?” Ben: “What?” Marc: “You only ever experience two emotions: euphoria and terror. And I find that lack of sleep enhances them both.

When the officer asked what he’d taken, Sunny blurted out in his accented English, “He stole property in his mind.

While Uber was more a business-like limo car sharing, Lyft was more casual. Though with time, that distinction has become less prominent, but this definitely helped them in the starting stage.

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.

By the time a student gets to college, he's spent a decade curating a bewilderingly diverse resume to prepare for a completely unknowable future. Come what may, he's ready--for nothing in particular.

When you start living the life of your dreams, there will always be obstacles, doubters, mistakes and setbacks along the way. But with hard work, perseverance and self-belief there is no limit to what you can achieve.

Maturity is when you stop complaining and making excuses, and start making changes.

People won't buy study guides for a dollar, but they will pay 100 dollars for test answers. A ‪#startup‬‬‬‬ should keep this mentality in mind.

Customers won’t care about any particular technology unless it solves a particular problem in a superior way. And if you can’t monopolize a unique solution for a small market, you’ll be stuck with vicious competition.

If your goal is to never make a mistake in your life, you shouldn’t look for secrets. The prospect of being lonely but right—dedicating your life to something that no one else believes in—is already hard. The prospect of being lonely and wrong can be unbearable.

you’ve invented something new but you haven’t invented an effective way to sell it, you have a bad business—no matter how good the product.

if you cannot fail, you cannot learn.

Hyping your product to get funding while concealing your true progress and hoping that reality will eventually catch up to the hype continues to be tolerated in the tech industry.

You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible.

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.

If you aren’t embarrassed by the first version of your product, you shipped too late.

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.

moving first is a tactic, not a goal.

The best projects are likely to be overlooked, not trumpeted by a crowd; the best problems to work on are often the ones nobody else even tries to solve.

The way Theranos is operating is like trying to build a bus while you’re driving the bus. Someone is going to get killed.

App idea: in real time track trends as swarms of keywords form, and use this data to invest in the next unicorn #startup. You'll be able to ride that #startup unicorn like you are Billy the Kid, as you watch your profits shoot up.

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

Most of a tech company’s value will come at least 10 to 15 years in the future.

Demand is one of those factors which decide the fate of your business.

If you have a great idea, let nothing stop you from bringing it to life.

CREATIVE MONOPOLY means new products that benefit everybody and sustainable profits for the creator. Competition means no profits for anybody, no meaningful differentiation, and a struggle for survival.

Elite students climb confidently until they reach a level of competition sufficiently intense to beat their dreams out of them. Higher education is the place where people who had big plans in high school get stuck in fierce rivalries with equally smart peers over conventional careers like management consulting and investment banking. For the privilege of being turned into conformists, students (or their families) pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in skyrocketing tuition that continues to outpace inflation. Why are we doing this to ourselves?

When in doubt, simplify.

Society flourishes when people think entrepreneurally.

It’s wonderful to dream big but you still have to be realistic.

Launching a similar product still needs some kind of differentiation.

There can’t be anything more fatal to a business than making decisions based on somebody else’s assumptions.

All Rhodes Scholars had a great future in their past.

Your business idea can wait but don’t enter a market without enough expertise and experience.

You don’t want to run your business based on mere suspicions and assumptions.

A successful business owner will know their business as good as they know their favorite celebrity, their partner, and even their dogs.

The future of your business depends on what kind of decisions you are going to make.

The process of decision-making can become efficient and effective, if the right information is handy on time.

Being successful is not that tough, you just need a little mindset change.

Perfecting a product which is not selling is a waste of time and energy.

Business growth happens when people remember you.

The fear of the unknown is deadly for our personal growth as well as for the growth of our business.

An idea gains value when you take action to bring it to life.

You’ll become the head of the number one tech start-up in all of China, and I’ll be a renowned, award-winning journalist or English professor. Together, we’ll—” “Be the nation’s greatest power couple?” he offers. “I was going to say conquer the world,” I admit. “But sure. I guess we can start small.

Accepting that you’re wrong, shows humility which will set a better example of you as a leader on your team than sticking to something that others can clearly see is wrong.

Become a leader that shows humility and not stubbornness.

Search engines' results aren’t always trustworthy. As a matter of fact, they can be easily manipulated.

In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable.

You know, those men: bike riding, knitted sweater? Pretends Facebook isn’t important to him, but it really is?” I was met with a blank stare, so carried on. “Craft beer, start-ups, sense of entitlement? Reads books by Alain de Botton, needs a girlfriend who doesn’t threaten his mediocrity?

When it comes to riding a trend for business growth, there are three important steps that we should always remember: data analysis, trend identification, and fast and effective decision making.

Startup CEOs should not play the odds. When you are building a company, you must believe there is an answer and you cannot pay attention to your odds of finding it. You just have to find it. It matters not whether your chances are nine in ten or one in a thousand; your task is the same.

The person passionate about what he or she is doing will outwork and outlast the guy motivated solely by making money.

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.

The road doesn’t have to be infinite after all. Take the hidden paths.

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

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.

First, only invest in companies that have the potential to return the value of the entire fund.

The most successful companies make the core progression—to first dominate a specific niche and then scale to adjacent markets—a part of their founding narrative.

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

Like her idol Steve Jobs, she emitted a reality distortion field that forced people to momentarily suspend disbelief.

anyone would fight for things that matter; true heroes take their personal honor so seriously they will fight for things that don’t matter.

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.

IP is an intangible asset—an idea converted into transferable personal property rights through patents, trademarks, copyrights, service marks, and trade secrets. IP covers every famous animated character you’ve ever heard of, the logos on your clothing. IP covers products and services you use every day—from flashlights to mobile phones, packaging to cars, food and beverage products, to smart thermostats. IP is not only for big businesses. Most start-ups and event microbusinesses have IP of some kind. 

Indefinite attitudes to the future explain what’s most dysfunctional in our world today. Process trumps substance: when people lack concrete plans to carry out, they use formal rules to assemble a portfolio of various options. This describes Americans today. In middle school, we’re encouraged to start hoarding “extracurricular activities.” In high school, ambitious students compete even harder to appear omnicompetent. By the time a student gets to college, he’s spent a decade curating a bewilderingly diverse résumé to prepare for a completely unknowable future. Come what may, he’s ready—for nothing in particular.

That’s why hiring consultants doesn’t work. Part-time employees don’t work. Even working remotely should be avoided, because misalignment can creep in whenever colleagues aren’t together full-time, in the same place, every day. If you’re deciding whether to bring someone on board, the decision is binary. Ken Kesey was right: you’re either on the bus or off the bus.

A sociopath is often described as someone with little or no conscience. I’ll leave it to the psychologists to decide whether Holmes fits the clinical profile, but there’s no question that her moral compass was badly askew. I’m fairly certain she didn’t initially set out to defraud investors and put patients in harm’s way when she dropped out of Stanford fifteen years ago. By all accounts, she had a vision that she genuinely believed in and threw herself into realizing. But in her all-consuming quest to be the second coming of Steve Jobs amid the gold rush of the “unicorn” boom, there came a point when she stopped listening to sound advice and began to cut corners. Her ambition was voracious and it brooked no interference. If there was collateral damage on her way to riches and fame, so be it.

Every culture has a myth of decline from some golden age, and almost all peoples throughout history have been pessimists. Even today pessimism still dominates huge parts of the world. An indefinite pessimist looks out onto a bleak future, but he has no idea what to do about it. This describes Europe since the early 1970s, when the continent succumbed to undirected bureaucratic drift. Today the whole Eurozone is in slow-motion crisis, and nobody is in charge. The European Central Bank doesn’t stand for anything but improvisation: the U.S. Treasury prints “In God We Trust” on the dollar; the ECB might as well print “Kick the Can Down the Road” on the euro. Europeans just react to events as they happen and hope things don’t get worse.

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.

Zen is not some fancy, special art of living. Our teaching is just to live, always in reality, in its exact sense. To make our effort, moment after moment, is our way. In an exact sense, the only thing we actually can study in our life is that on which we are working in each moment. We cannot even study Buddha’s words.” - “So we should be concentrated with our full mind and body on what we do; and we should be faithful, subjectively and objectively, to ourselves, and especially to our feelings. Even when you do not feel so well, it is better to express how you feel without any particular attachment or intention. So you may say, “Oh, I am sorry, I do not feel well.