100 Startup Quotes & Sayings

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. For the startup world, this means you should not necessarily start your own company, even if you are extraordinarily talented. If anything, too many people are starting their own companies today. People who understand the power law will hesitate more than others when it comes to founding a new venture: they know how tremendously successful they could become by joining the very best company while it's growing fast. The power law means that differences between companies will dwarf the differences in roles inside companies. You could have 100% of the equity if you fully fund your own venture, but if it fails you'll have 100% of nothing. Owning just 0.01% of Google, by contrast, is incredibly valuable (more than $35 million as of this writing). — Peter Thiel

You expecting a collapse, Gunny?" "The technical sergeant is repairing alien technology with a piece of torn uniform - I'm expected the Goddamned tunnel to blow up." "Ressk's helping." Mike's voice sounded muffled. "And that makes all the difference," Torin snorted. — Tanya Huff

Everyone tries to look a cookie-cutter kind of way, and actually the people who look different are the ones who get picked up. — Meryl Streep

We have to make a really cold judgement. Would the consequence of civil war be more devastating than the consequences of staying the course?. — Zbigniew Brzezinski

Why are you doing this?"
"That's easy. Because I like you." He grinned. "I like you a lot."
"Why?"
"Because you make me smile."
"You're Addolgar the Cheerful. Everything makes you smile."
"Not everything. And if I want to like you, Braith of the Darkness, I get to like you. Whether you want me to or not. — G.A. Aiken

Like so many works that have had a great impact on human thinking, it makes points that, once they are grasped, have a ring of almost self-evident truth; yet they are still blindly ignored by a disconcertingly large proportion of people who should know better. — Erwin Schrodinger

A discovery is like falling in love and reaching the top of a mountain after a hard climb all in one, an ecstasy not induced by drugs but by the revelation of a face of nature that no one has seen before and that often turns out to be more subtle and wonderful than anyone had imagined. — Max F. Perutz

One of my first investments was $100,000 in a Web-based calendar startup - and I lost every dollar. — Peter Thiel

All of our sons and daughters ought to have the same opportunity to experience the joy and stability of marriage. — Rob Portman

Whatever excites you, go do it. Whatever drains you, stop doing it. — Derek Sivers

I'm not laughing, and I'm not running. I wont lie either. You're a chilling sight to behold. I've had nightmares of monsters prettier than you." She stepped closer and raised her other hand to thread her fingers through his hair. This time he didn't flinch away. "But you're still you under all this flux nonsense. Only a fool of a woman would run from such an extraordinary man, and I am no fool, Ballard de Sauveterre. — Grace Draven

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. — Steven Gary Blank

Don't say I was tough. I was strong. I had to be, because Ronnie liked everybody and sometimes didn't see - or refused to see - what the people around him were really up to. But everything I did, I did for Ronnie. I did for love. — Nancy Reagan

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. — Peter Thiel

It's always a fun collaboration with my brother. I'm very fortunate to be able to work with him. There's an honesty to collaboration. There's a lack of a gender or ego in our conversations. And so you can really throw anything around. — Christopher Nolan

It's the strange world.'
'The strangest. — Stephenie Meyer

A NASA-funded study estimates that if the price of a ticket to space approached $100,000, close to a million people would buy one. That's a $100 billion industry. Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen gave me $20 million in startup funding to go after that market. — Burt Rutan

Wisdom disguises our wounds; it teaches us how to bleed in secret. — Emile M. Cioran