Quotes & Sayings About Starting A New Company

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

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

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

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

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

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

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