Quotes & Sayings About Building Companies

Only a couple of companies in the world have the experience of building these machines, although the market need, if RFID did take off, would be for about 1 million of the machines running in parallel. — Mike Marsh

I am a serious businesswoman. I don't enjoy being out there on TV; it's not what I do well. But I love building companies; I love making products. — Jennifer Flavin

I once called construction companies to bid on an addition to the school library so that there would suddenly be people outside, measuring the building. 'Who authorized this?' the principal would ask. The answer: 'Howie Mandel.' — Howie Mandel

I've witnessed first hand the impact the Benchmark team has had on new ventures, and I believe their commitment to the entrepreneur and dedication to building companies of lasting value really set the firm apart. — Mitch Lasky

People are bad at looking at seeds and guessing what size tree will grow out of them. The way you'll get big ideas in, say, health care is by starting out with small ideas. If you try to do some big thing, you don't just need it to be big; you need it to be good. And it's really hard to do big and good simultaneously. So, what that means is you can either do something small and good and then gradually make it bigger, or do something big and bad and gradually make it better. And you know what? Empirically, starting big just does not work. That's the way the government does things. They do something really big that's really bad, and they think, Well, we'll make it better, and then it never gets better.
Building Fast Companies for Growth, Inc. September 2013 — Paul Graham

An MBA is a great degree for career paths like investment banking, finance, consulting, and large companies. An MBA is not necessarily the right path for starting a tech company. You should be building a prototype, not getting an MBA in that case. — Guy Kawasaki

The reason companies work is because you're able to get a lot of people doing the work; it's not because of this visionary. Steve Jobs didn't make Apple; it was a bunch of people. The building of the right team is an art in and of its own right. — D.A. Wallach

This device became a big hit. Our new challenge became how to satisfy demand for it. To put this in perspective, we were a company composed of a handful of people with a new type of design and a fragile technology, housed in a little rented building, and we were trying to supply the seemingly insatiable appetite of large computer companies for memory chips. The — Andrew S. Grove

Building companies involves creating great wealth. If that means I am an oligarch, OK, it's fine. But if being an oligarch is about buying football clubs, it is not for me. — Alexei Mordashov

I didn't really start building my own stuff until I was 24, 25 or so, and even then, I ran into a lot of resistance from, like, older folks, like my bosses at other companies or people in the industry that were like, 'Oh that's an interesting idea, but it will never work.' And, I don't know, I kind of believed everything that they told me. — Dennis Crowley

Unlike a lot of other game companies that, once they launch a game, downsize their teams radically, our plan is to keep the team together and continue to focus on building content. — James Ohlen

It's far more difficult being a small-business owner starting a business than it is for me with thousands of people working for us and 400 companies. Building a business from scratch is 24 hours, 7 days a week, divorces, it's difficult to hold your family life together, it's bloody hard work and only one word really matters - and that's surviving. — Richard Branson

We tell our portfolio companies that it's really important to be metrics-driven and to track their conversions. It goes back to building that scalable sales model. — Devon McDonald

I have a lot of intention behind what I put out there. The reason all this stuff I do works together, the environmental and social, collaborating with ballet companies to score a show, the bike tour - all of that stuff comes together through community building with music. — Ben Sollee

Today the man who has the courage to build himself a house constructs a meeting place for the people who will descend upon him on foot, by car, or by telephone. Employees of the gas, the electric, and the water- works will arrive; agents from life and fire insurance companies; building inspectors, collectors of radio tax; mortgage creditors and rent assessors who tax you for living in your own home. — Ernst Junger

Koch Industries is an amazing business that has succeeded by building a product that customers love dearly. The folks who run Koch are very clear. They would love to have government just get out of the way and allow companies to compete, whether in their particular sectors or other sectors. They are true believers in small government. — Mike Pompeo

It's almost a cliche that great Silicon Valley entrepreneurs don't go sit on a beach when they make a lot of money; they get back to work building another company or at least investing in other people's companies. — Sarah Lacy

There are areas using what's called the "checkerboard strategy." They are different cities where you can move around the "checkerboard," doing things you can't do in every square, that you can do in some of them, building a mosaic of these kinds of practices. There are about 400 cable television networks, for example, that are publicly owned. That's a big fight for big private companies. In some areas, this is a political struggle, in some it's conventional common sense. — Gar Alperovitz

I'm doing my part, building plants at a record rate, having historic conservation levels. The only people not doing their part is the federal government that is siding with the energy companies against the interests of the people of California. — Gray Davis

The vast majority of debt that Anglo maintains is owed is strenuously disputed. However, I cannot now pay those loans which are due, following Anglo taking control of the Quinn Group of companies, which I and a loyal team spent a lifetime building. — Sean Quinn

Opera halls, ballets, and large art museums receive more funding
and not all from the government
than do popular art and what might be considered popular music venues ... But there are plenty of innovative musicians ... who have had as much trouble surviving as symphony orchestras and ballet companies ... Why not invest in the future of music, instead of building fortresses to preserve its past? ... The 2011 annual operating budget for the New York Metropolitan Opera is $325 million; a big chunk of that, $182 million, came from donations from wealthy patrons. — David Byrne

what valuable company is nobody building? Every correct answer is necessarily a secret: something important and unknown, something hard to do but doable. If there are many secrets left in the world, there are probably many world-changing companies yet to be started. — Peter Thiel

Private companies should be building businesses. — Peter Diamandis

Building companies rules of the game have all changed today. It used to cost millions of dollars to do anything substantial. You'd get VC backing & then you'd hire the team to build it. Now it's deploy or die. — Ziad K. Abdelnour

Incredibly, oil and gas companies don't have to pay certain environmental costs that amount to small change to them, while an offshore wind project start-up is faced with fees that could mean the difference between building a wind farm and packing up and going home. — Chellie Pingree

Years ago when you'd go to a working group most of the people in the working group would be from universities. Now most of the people are from companies who are building internet products and care what the standards turn out to be. — Jon Postel

As these contrasts show, capitalism has undergone enormous changes in the last two and a half centuries. While some of Smith's basic principles remain valid, they do so only at very general levels.
For example, competition among profit-seeking firms may still be the key driving force of capitalism, as in Smith's scheme. But it is not between small, anonymous firms which, accepting consumer tastes, fight it out by increasing the efficiency in the use of given technology. Today, competition is among huge multinational companies, with the ability not only to influence prices but to redefine technologies in a short span of time (think about the battle between Apple and Samsung) and to manipulate consumer tastes through brand-image building and advertising. — Ha-Joon Chang

If we're building high quality companies, if the customers like the products, if the technology innovation is real, then the substance is going to win out in the end. — Marc Andreesen

He's a family man and a businessman. He spent his career building successful companies. Then, he saved the 2002 Olympics and brought pride to our nation. As governor, he balanced the budget, cut taxes, and created jobs. The president America needs is Mitt Romney! — Reince Priebus

CFR's Renewing America initiative - from which this book arose - has focused on those areas of economic policy that are the most important for reinforcing America's competitive strengths. Education, corporate tax policy, and infrastructure, for example, are issues that historically have been considered largely matters of domestic policy. Yet in a highly competitive global economy, an educated workforce, a competitive tax structure, and an efficient transportation network are all crucial to attracting investment and delivering goods and services that can succeed in global markets. The line between domestic economic policy and foreign economic policy is in many cases now almost invisible. Building a more competitive economy for the future requires that our political leaders - not just in Congress and the White House but also in state and local governments - understand how their policy choices can affect the choices of companies that can now invest almost anywhere in the world. — Edward Alden

The good news about building a company during times like this is that the companies that do succeed are going to be extremely strong and resilient. — Marc Andreessen

Companies have to nurture [creativity and motivation]-and have to do it by building a compassionate yet performance-driven corporate culture. In the knowledge economy the traditional soft people side of our business has become the new hard side. — Gay Mitchell

companies are focused on building products rather than brands. A product is something made in a factory. A brand is something made in the mind. To be successful today, you have to build brands, not products. And you build brands by using positioning strategies, starting with a good name. Any — Al Ries

My friends are people who like building cool stuff. We always have this joke about people who want to just start companies without making something valuable. There's a lot of that in Silicon Valley. — Mark Zuckerberg

The rules of engagement around building a brand have changed significantly over the past 10 to 15 years. Where companies at one time could spread their message through traditional marketing, consumers now seek an enduring emotional connection with the companies they patronize. The foundation of that connection is the most important characteristic of building a world-class brand: trust. Trust with your people and trust with your customers. — Howard Schultz

No one has a monopoly on knowledge the way that, say, IBM had in the 1960s in computing, or that Bell Labs had through the 1970s in communications. When useful knowledge exists in companies of all sizes and also in universities, non-profits and individual minds, it makes sense to orient your innovation efforts to accessing, building upon and integrating that external knowledge into useful products and services. — Henry Chesbrough

Building fast-growing, globally competitive companies is tough. — Kevin O'Leary

If you were charged with fixing the U.S. auto industry, how would you do it?

The guys who run the auto companies are out of touch with their customers and their employees. They ride to work in their limousines. They go up in their elevators and lock themselves in their offices. They don't walk out into the plants. They wouldn't even drive in the neighborhoods where their employees live. They give themselves big bonuses when the company isn't making any money. I'd make them get involved with the people who are building the cars. They've got to become real people. — Ken Hendricks

A dapper Canadian in his mid-fifties, Rob McEwen bought the disparate collection of gold mining companies known as Goldcorp in 1989. A decade later, he'd unified those companies and was ready for expansion - a process he wanted to start by building a new refinery. — Peter Diamandis

I love what the Valley does. I love company building. I love startups. I love technology companies. I love new technology. I love this process of invention. Being able to participate in that as a founder and a product creator, or as an investor or a board member, I just find that hugely satisfying. — Marc Andreessen

Figure out what you do best, and build a team second to none around that ... # 1 Requirement in building first class companies. — Ziad K. Abdelnour

Creative people in particular traditionally have strained relations with systems, structures, standards, and other perceived constraints on their creative freedom. Nowhere is this clearer than in big organizations where people often complain that "the systems" kill creativity, longingly thinking back to the halcyon days when the company was young and less bureaucratic. Going back to the unstructured start-up days is not an option, however. Established companies require a different kind of innovation: they need a culture in which creativity is part of the corporate ecosystem. The key to building a creative culture is not to declare war on systems, processes, and policies, but to embrace and redesign them so they support and actively enhance innovative behavior. Managers, in other words, have to fight systems with systems, creating an architecture of innovation in their teams and departments. The primary aim is to help people behave more like innovators. — Paddy Miller

It's hard to tell with these Internet startups if they're really interested in building companies or if they're just interested in the money. I can tell you, though: If they don't really want to build a company, they won't luck into it. That's because it's so hard that if you don't have a passion, you'll give up. — Steve Jobs

Jay Z is building a range of businesses just on the strength of his brand. Lady Gaga has formed really interesting partnerships. Justin Bieber and his manager Scooter Braun are investing in a number of different companies and also promoting them in many ways. — Anita Elberse

One day I asked him if he had come to enjoy the process of building companies, now that he was trying to do so for a third time. "Uh, no," he started, as if I were a fool. But if he didn't enjoy building companies, he sure had a thoughtful and convincing way of describing why he kept doing it. "The only purpose, for me, in building a company is so that that company can make products. One is a means to the other. Over a period of time you realize that building a very strong company and a very strong foundation of talent and culture in a company is essential to keep making great products. — Brent Schlender

Too many companies think they want to do a video blog to sell merchandise, but if you turn your site into QVC, you lose. I have an audience that trusts me. It's about building a global brand - not selling four more bottles of Pinot Grigio. — Gary Vaynerchuk

It's happening: Lou Dobbs' dream come true and Silicon Valley's worst nightmare. We're already seeing the reverse brain drain as smart immigrants take their U.S. educations and experience building companies and creating technology back to their home countries. — Sarah Lacy

The collision of mobile and social platforms and the need to build these companies from the ground up - whether it's a game, a healthcare application, an education application - building these from the ground up is what allows entrepreneurial activity to be unleashed. — Jim Breyer

Authority never matches responsibility. That's one of the great myths and delusions of all times. Winning managers and individual performers at all levels know that effectiveness means building your own network and creating your own authority. Those who succeed always reach far beyond formal deputation, take initiatives, and take the heat when things go awry. That's true in the military in times of war, true for 200 person manufacturing firms, and true at giant automakers or software companies. — Tom Peters

Business chief executive officers and their boards succumb to the pressures of the financial markets and their fears of takeovers and pour out their energies to produce quarterly earnings - at the expense of building their companies for the long term. — J. Irwin Miller

I busted my butt all my life building companies. — Wayne Huizenga

Morgan then formed the U.S. Steel Corporation, combining Carnegie's corporation with others. He sold stocks and bonds for $1,300,000,000 (about 400 million more than the combined worth of the companies) and took a fee of 150 million for arranging the consolidation. How could dividends be paid to all those stockholders and bondholders? By making sure Congress passed tariffs keeping out foreign steel; by closing off competition and maintaining the price at $28 a ton; and by working 200,000 men twelve hours a day for wages that barely kept their families alive. And so it went, in industry after industry - shrewd, efficient businessmen building empires, choking out competition, maintaining high prices, keeping wages low, using government subsidies. These industries were the first beneficiaries of the welfare state. — Howard Zinn

Haier, a Chinese brand, exemplifies the trend of emerging market companies building brands that are being accepted, if not recognized, by the Western consumer. — Nirmalya Kumar

Building a business and becoming a billionaire is it's not championship. It's the competence; the competence in your sector with other companies not looking to have some kind of records in this issue. — Carlos Slim

For me, the most entertaining evening would be to go sit with entrepreneurs and talk with them about how they're building their companies and how we can help to make them better. That's the one thing in the world - well, I love doing that. — Ashton Kutcher

Do not presume global competitiveness from any feature of society in Silicon Valley, save those which are directly related to building great tech companies. — Anonymous

The fact that companies are getting into building power plants that collect their own CO2 on-site shows there's some leadership in that industry. Some industries have seen the writing on the wall: that carbon will have to be managed. — Klaus Lackner

...a long-term reputation is only at risk when companies engage in vocal launch activities such as PR and building hype. When a product fails to live up to those pronouncements, real long-term damage can happen to a corporate brand. But startups have the advantage of being obscure, having a pathetically small number of customers and not having much exposure. Rather than lamenting them, use these advantages to experiment under the radar and then do a public marketing launch once the product has proved itself with real customers. — Eric Ries

Women are more proactive. By their nature, they're genetically designed to nurture their offspring. Men have always been the hunters in their society. But it's changing. Women are now doing two things: They're building companies and they're giving birth to kids. — Horst Rechelbacher

Research has found that in most companies managers who get promoted rapidly spend most of their time networking and politicking, while their more effective colleagues spent their time building their units and developing their people. — Alan G. Robinson

The balance of power is shifting toward consumers and away from companies The right way to respond to this if you are a company is to put the vast majority of your energy, attention and dollars into building a great product or service and put a smaller amount into shouting about it, marketing it. — Jeff Bezos

Today's merger makers are not ad people; they're building communications companies. — Jerry Della Femina

For all the popularity of spiritual advisers in South Korea, it still shocks to see the leaders of huge public companies relying on fortune-tellers. A shaman may advise a struggling executive to move a building's front entrance, tapping the widespread pungsu belief that your luck depends on the direction of your house. — Kim Young-ha

I've been very engaged in Illinois and Chicago civic activities for a long time; mostly around building businesses and helping entrepreneurs grow companies, but also around education and education reform. — Bruce Rauner