Quotes & Sayings About Starting A Company

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

My dream was actually just to have a computer some day. If I'd imagined that it meant starting a company to sell them, I probably would have avoided the whole thing. — Steve Wozniak

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 simply can't be tentative in a startup. You have to go for it at every chance you get. And if the leader of the organization is anxious, his or her fear pervades the organization. Everything comes from the top in a company. So if you are starting a company or building one, face your fears and move past them. It's critically important to your company. — Fred Wilson

I'm starting to feel like an old man
alone in a small boat
In a snowfall of blossoms,
Only the south wind for company,
Drifting downriver, the beautiful costumes of spring
Approaching me down the runway
of all I've ever wished for.
Voices from long ago floating across the water.
How to account for
my single obsession about the past?
How to account for
these blossoms as white as an autumn frost?
Dust of the future baptizing our faithless foreheads.
Alone in a small boat, released in a snowfall of blossoms. — Charles Wright

It seems like every time I agree to work with a video game company they go out of business. I stopped because I was starting to feel guilty. — Neil Gaiman

When you're starting a company, almost anything that can go wrong will go wrong, and it will probably look like and feel like you made the absolute wrong decision to start the company. If you're not absolutely determined to solve a problem or see something through, it might not make sense to keep going. — Logan Green

The bad thing about young people starting a company is that sometimes they do it for the wrong reasons or because they have the wrong skill set, but the good thing is that they don't have any of the old paradigms baked into them, so they have a lot of the bright new ideas that are harder to come by as you get older. — Ben Horowitz

Being an entrepreneur and starting new companies require a lot of sacrifice. Sacrifice that you have to make. Because in order to be really successful, your company becomes your life. And then you have to really dedicate your time and energy fully to this endeavor that you start. — Anousheh Ansari

At age 28, I had no retail experience, no consumer marketing experience and no real Internet experience. But I decided I wanted to work for myself. I felt starting a company would enable me to get the responsibility I deserved and that I couldn't do that within the confines of a bigger company. — Mariam Naficy

This concept that starting a company is so hard and that you'll never make it is conspiracy concocted by the rich and powerful to keep you from trying - and you've fallen for it. — Jason Calacanis

Being an entrepreneur isn't just a job title, and it isn't just about starting a company. It's a state of mind. It's about seeing connections others can't, seizing opportunities others won't, and forging new directions that others haven't. — Tory Burch

Over the last ten years, technological advances have dramatically lowered the financial bar for starting a new company, but the courage bar for building a great company remains as high as it has ever been. — Ben Horowitz

Being a startup entrepreneur is not for everybody and it's not the only desirable career choice. I also know that many people have families and cost obligations that don't allow the kinds of financial risks associated with starting a company. And for others the hours, stresses and sacrifices in personal relationships are not worth it. — Mark Suster

In most parts of the world, starting a company that goes bust is dubbed a 'failure.' In Silicon Valley, we call this 'gaining experience.' We are willing to take the risks that are inherent for innovation. — Sebastian Thrun

If you are starting a business, or want to ask for a raise, or want to pursue a new career, you can have a Vedic astrologer determine the best time for such actions (muhurtha). You can also receive the best possible date to incorporate or establish a business. I have seen numerous occasions where struggling businesspeople have dissolved a company that was begun at an inauspicious time, and re-established their business with a Vedic astrologer's help on a much better date, with good results. In fact, the results can be remarkable. — Andrew Bloomfield

Zach is part of an exploding movement of social entrepreneurs who offer new approaches to supporting women in the developing world. Aid workers function in the context of an aid bureaucracy, while social entrepreneurs create their own context by starting a new organization, company, or movement to address a social problem in a creative way. Social entrepreneurs tend not to have the traditional liberal suspicion of capitalism, and many charge for services and use a business model to achieve sustainability. Social entrepreneurs are not content just to give a fish or teach how to fish. They will not rest until they have revolutionized the fishing industry. — Nicholas D. Kristof

I stayed in the astronaut program until 1993. People ask me why I left. I thought I had a lot of things to contribute that would be difficult to do if I stayed. I thought I could have a stronger voice as an advocate for space exploration. So I ended up starting my own technology consulting company. — Mae Jemison

As a kid, I harbored this fantasy of starting a company. I looked at the entrepreneur column in Forbes. I looked at it every month and thought, 'I want to be that guy.' — Jeremy Stoppelman

I've lived on my own since 17, and when I found I wasn't working all the time, I ended up starting a small theatre company called Red One Theatre. — Joe Dinicol

Help each user personally. Sure that won't scale to a very large size, but when a startup is just starting out, it really helps you have an advantage as a small and nimble company. — John Collison

In 2001, my co-workers at PayPal and I would often get lunch on Castro Street in Mountain View. We had our pick of restaurants, starting with obvious categories like Indian, sushi, and burgers. There were more options once we settled on a type: North Indian or South Indian, cheaper or fancier, and so on. In contrast to the competitive local restaurant market, PayPal was at that time the only email-based payments company in the world. We employed fewer people than the restaurants on Castro Street did, but our business was much more valuable than all of those restaurants combined. Starting a new South Indian restaurant is a really hard way to make money. If you lose sight of competitive reality and focus on trivial differentiating factors - maybe you think your naan is superior because of your great-grandmother's recipe - your business is unlikely to survive. — Peter Thiel

Starting a business is risky. Half of all new businesses fail to experience a fifth anniversary. And everyone knows that you could lose all the money you've invested in your new company and then some. Those are the obvious risks of trying to be an entrepreneur. — Scott Shane

If you're an entrepreneur and you're starting a company, I think the first thing you do is you go and talk to a bunch of people. But then the next thing you probably should do is figure out if there's a broader demand than just people you know. That's where I think SurveyMonkey is pretty valuable to people. — Dave Goldberg

Starting a company, your success is going to be very dependent on how you adapt. You're going to make decisions, you're going to make bets; most of them are going to turn out to be wrong. — Jeremy Stoppelman

I made a boy's mistake, common enough, of thinking that real life was knowing many things and many people, living dangerously in faraway places, crossing the sea, or starting a power company on the Columbia River, a steamship line in Bolivia. — Mark Helprin

Starting a company is like going to war. You can't do anything else but be fully engaged. You have to be insanely, passionately, nothing-can-stop-me committed. — Audrey MacLean

Work-life balance for founders doesn't look like work-life balance for everyone else. Starting a company isn't a nine-to-six job - or a nine-to-nine job, or a nine-to-midnight job. — Kathryn Minshew

I consistently run into young adults who have quickly turned away from traditional jobs at great companies to try their hand at a start-up. I believe that some of this stems from the desire to strike it big like Mark Zuckerberg, but I also believe it is because starting a company has become far cooler than working in one. — Maynard Webb

You know you're ready to write a book when you have a feeling that you should do it, no matter what anybody says. It's like falling in love or starting a company. When you're still wondering if you should get married or you're still wondering whether you should start a company that might be not the right person or the right idea. And writing is the same way. When you've locked on to the topic, you'll just write it. — Guy Kawasaki

I was never a joiner. I tried - I had people I admired and liked and wanted to hang with, but I ended up starting a theatre company and that took me back to Chicago ... I guess I wasn't a scenester in the end. Something must have worked out right, as I'm still here - but I'm only a binge socialite. — John Cusack

I had so many people try to talk me out of starting a rocket company, it was crazy. — Elon Musk

The biggest barrier to starting a company isn't ideas, funding or experience. It's excuses. — Sarah Lacy

What starting your company means: you will lose your stable income, your right to apply for a leave of absence, and your right to get a bonus. However, it also means your income will no longer be limited, you will use your time more effectively, and you will no longer need to beg for favours from people anymore. — Jack Ma

When I first met my husband, he had a very good job - company car, pension plan, grudging respect from his staff - the lot. I, on the other hand, was badly paid and devoid of ambition. Then I had a couple of books published and confounded all expectations by starting to earn more than he did. — Marian Keyes

I could imagine, some number of years from now, starting my own company. But not yet. Not for a while. — Marissa Mayer

You're missing it. This is not a one-man show. What's reinvigorating this company is two things: One, there's a lot of really talented people in this company who listened to the world tell them they were losers for a couple of years, and some of them were on the verge of starting to believe it themselves. But they're not losers. What they didn't have was a good set of coaches, a good plan. A good senior management team. But they have that now. — Steve Jobs

Once you create and dominate a niche market, then you should gradually expand into related and slightly broader markets. Amazon shows how it can be done. Jeff Bezos's founding vision was to dominate all of online retail, but he very deliberately started with books. There were millions of books to catalog, but they all had roughly the same shape, they were easy to ship, and some of the most rarely sold books - those least profitable for any retail store to keep in stock - also drew the most enthusiastic customers. Amazon became the dominant solution for anyone located far from a bookstore or seeking something unusual. Amazon then had two options: expand the number of people who read books, or expand to adjacent markets. They chose the latter, starting with the most similar markets: CDs, videos, and software. Amazon continued to add categories gradually until it had become the world's general store. The name itself brilliantly encapsulated the company's scaling strategy. — Peter Thiel

As a young entrepreneur starting an enterprise company, be prepared for the fact that you'll need to get involved in enterprise sales. Everyone wants to speak to the founder, and this is also how you'll get feedback on your product. It's worth bringing in early somebody with enterprise sales experience. — Anthony Goldbloom

I had dreams of starting a company like Burmah Shell. — Dhirubhai Ambani

Starting a company is a cause, not a job. Once it becomes a job, that's when you lose — Ben Parr

The business model piece is we're always talking about competing more effectively. If you're starting a company or career you don't want to compete. You want to create a monopoly. We want to invest in a company that has a good plan to create a monopoly. — Peter Thiel

You know what? Starting a car company is risky. — Henrik Fisker

The hardest thing about starting a company and running a company is, there's just so many expectations on you, and there are so many people who have things that they want you to do. It's a lot like life about that. — Ben Horowitz

I try not to dwell on big mistakes but to move on when I make a mistake. I make mistakes most of the times and that's part of the risk profile being an entrepreneur. I guess one big mistake I did was not to start my own company earlier. I spent nine years working for others before starting Kazaa in 2000. — Niklas Zennstrom