Best Startup Quotes & Sayings

Imagine working 20% smarter instead of 20% longer ... Work-life balance and startup success at any stage aren't mutually exclusive. There are enough hours in the day to be effective and present. — David Cummings

Thinking about joining a startup? Ask for a hiring bonus equal to the exercise cost, early exercise rights, and NSOs instead of ISOs. Exercise as soon as possible and ASAP file an 83(b) Election. Recently hired? If you can afford to fully exercise your options and are permitted to do so, ask to get your ISOs converted to NSOs, perform an early exercise, and file an 83(b) Election. — David Weekly

Rule #1: Sweat equity is the best startup capital — Mark Cuban

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

Startups and small businesses that do not invest at least 10% of their profits into R&D will have the privilege of remaining a startup and/or a small business. — Mark Anthony Peterson

I mean, look, the government is not a startup obviously. But projects to change government I think are best thought of as startups. — Todd Park

The first thing to recognize is that no startup has time to do optional things. — Ben Horowitz

Whether by design or circumstance, every startup will eventually get disrupted. — Jay Samit

It's difficult to get large groups of people, to the extreme levels of focus and productivity that you need, for a startup to be successful. — Sam Altman

Every startup has a chance to change the world, by bringing not just a new product, but an entirely new institution into existence. — Eric Ries

Entrepreneurs don't ask for permission. They act per a mission. — Ryan Lilly

I think that's exactly what Silicon Valley was all about in those days. Let's do a startup in our parents' garage and try to create a business. — Walter Isaacson

Coming from Ireland, it's quite hard to do a startup because you're culturally so far away from what everyone else is doing. In the Bay Area, it's much easier. It's the equivalent of an actor or actress moving to Hollywood. — John Collison

Maturity is when you stop complaining and making excuses and start making changes. — Roy Bennett

When we're considering investing in a startup, we first want to know that the entrepreneur has a clear understanding of the market. Who are the major players? What about this market is ripe for disruption? What is this startup's unfair advantage to disrupt this market? In the first conversation we have with a company, these are questions that we're looking for clear answers to. — Mike Belsito

I'm a creature of startups. For example, I don't want government interference in the startup ecosystem. — Michael Arrington

I think we didn't know what we were doing. I think the hallmark of a really good entrepreneur is that you're not really going to build one specific company. The goal - at least the way I think about entrepreneur- ship - is you realize one day that you can't really work for anyone else. You have to start your own thing. It almost doesn't matter what that thing is. We had six different business plan changes, and then the last one was PayPal. — Max Levchin

We paired this announcement of the R&D [commitment] with the so-called Breakthrough Energy Coalition, which is 27 [major investors] saying, "Hey, we'll put significant money into [energy innovations] when they're ready to spin out probably into startup companies." — Bill Gates

The median startup is a business that's capitalized with about $25,000. The financing of that business comes from the entrepreneur's savings. The business is a retail or personal service business, a hair salon or a clothing store, that kind of thing. — Scott Shane

The life of a startup is full of ups and downs, an emotional roller coaster ride that you can't quite imagine if you've spent your whole career in a corporation. — Harvey MacKay

The startup's goal is to find a profitable customer acquisition strategy by spending small amounts of money in a lot of them, measuring results, and then narrowing down the best channels, while performing PDCA for continuous improvement. — Francisco S. Homem De Mello

Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, explains that the best way to get to Product Market Fit is by starting with a "minimum viable product" and improving it based on feedback - as opposed to what most of us do, which is to try to launch publicly with what we think is our final, perfected product. Today, — Ryan Holiday

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

The best founders are extremely thoughtful and have an eye for quality. I don't know if there's any generic advice here that would be helpful. Startup knowledge is a moving target. — Naval Ravikant

Let's say a startup is hot. It ships something great, and it achieves success. Thus, it's able to attract the best, brightest, and most talented. These people have been told they're the best since childhood. Indeed, being hired by the hot company is "proof" that they are the A and A+ players; in fact, the company is so hot that it can out-recruit Google and Microsoft. — Guy Kawasaki

A successful startup takes a very long time - certainly much longer than most founders think at the outset. You cannot treat it as an all-nighter. You have to eat well, sleep well, and exercise. You have to spend time with your family and friends. You also need to work in an area you're actually passionate about - nothing else will sustain you for ten years. — Sam Altman

An entrepreneur without funding is a musician without an instrument. — Robert A. Rice Jr.

When Thomas and John Knoll launched Photoshop 1.0 in 1990, the software couldn't even handle color images. But their offerings got the startup noticed by Apple and Adobe, both of whom became key to the fledgling company's later success. — Jay Samit

Like a tracer running through the veins of the city, networks of air quality sensors attached to bikes can help measure an individual's exposure to pollution and draw a dynamic map of the urban air on a human scale, as in the case of the Copenhagen Wheel developed by new startup Superpedestrian. — Carlo Ratti

Of course the Silicon Valley is unique and Berlin is not yet comparable. But of all the different cities that are building a startup infrastructure, Berlin is the one with the most similar energy. — Mark Zuckerberg

Recruiting talent is no different than any other challenge a startup faces. It's all about selling. — Vivek Wadhwa

The more detailed we made our plans, the longer our cycle times became — Donald G. Reinertsen

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

When strategy, culture, and brand harmonize, they amplify one another and resonate loud and clear. — Kate O'Neill

The problem with the Internet startup craze isn't that too many people are starting companies; it's that too many people aren't sticking with it. That's somewhat understandable, because there are many moments that are filled with despair and agony, when you have to fire people and cancel things and deal with very difficult situations. That's when you find out who you are and what your values are. — Steve Jobs

When you're doing a startup, life is not all roses and rainbows, like you see on Instagram, and killing it. — Paige Craig

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. — Ben Horowitz

If you are a new startup company, try not to arouse the interest or suspicion of your competition; especially if they are a bigger company. They can crush you while you are still in your startup phase. Lie low while still strengthening your bottom line. — Richard Branson

My first job after college was at Magic Quest, an educational software startup company where I was responsible for writing the content. I found that job somewhat accidentally but after working there a few weeks and loving my job, I decided to pursue a career in technology. — Susan Wojcicki

A startup can focus on only one metric. So you have to decide what that is and ignore everything else. — Noah Kagan

My most radical shift was leaving Intel and joining Google, a small startup at the time, even though I was pregnant. — Susan Wojcicki

Wait to start a startup until you come up with an idea that you feel compelled to explore. — Sam Altman

Regret nothing. Everything broken can be remade. And everything remade can once again be broken — Kulpreet Yadav

For a startup to overcome obstacles and succeed, it must foster limitless thinking. By hiring students into their first career job, you get to set their framework for how a company functions and instill them with your values for your company's culture. — Jay Samit

In a startup, both the problem and solution are unknown. — Eric Ries

A startup is like a mosquito. A bear can absorb a hit and a crab is armored against one, but a mosquito is designed for one thing : to score. No energy is wasted on defense. The defense of mosquitos, as a species, is that there are a lot of them, but this is little consolation to the individual mosquito. — Paul Graham