Quotes on Entrepreneurs

It's a common misconception that money is every entrepreneur's metric for success. It's not, and nor should it be.

Most entrepreneurs are merely technicians with an entrepreneurial seizure. Most entrepreneurs fail because you are working IN your business rather than ON your business.

I was seeing a lot of entrepreneurs who were effectively working on the next photo-sharing app. I wanted to inspire them to go much bigger, bolder and more significant than that.

Entrepreneurs or international conglomerateurs, or large financial institutions buy or create mutual fund management companies to create a return on their own capital. It's capitalism at work, where the rewards tend to go to the managers rather than the investors.

A lot of entrepreneurs hate big companies. But if you hate them so much, why are you trying to build a new one? The truth is, as soon as a startup has any kind of success whatsoever, it will face big company problems.

Entrepreneurs say in an economic boom it's actually hard to build a company because everybody's too excited and there is too much money funding too many marginal companies.

Entrepreneurs spend an inordinate amount of time inside of our own heads - thinking, analyzing, agonizing and obsessing over every little detail of our business. Sometimes, we need a break from ourselves. Meditation is a chance to let the thinking mind rest.

We worked personally with a lot of great VCs. They just work incredibly hard at supporting entrepreneurs and their companies.

The same instincts that make us good students can make us lousy entrepreneurs.

As I've conducted my interviews with crowdsourcing entrepreneurs and experts, it's constantly hit me that your ability to do something big and bold is really a function of the size and quality of your crowd.

The biggest problem I see with early-stage entrepreneurs is they get the idea in their head, and they leave it in their head. And they begin embellishing it in their head, making it more ornate. They add on the second story to their dream house - then add the tennis court and the turrets and the gargoyles.

Entrepreneurs have only the murkiest picture of the future in which they are making their bets, and also there is ambiguity: they don't know when they push this lever or that lever that the outcome is going to be what they think it is going to be - there is the law of unanticipated consequences.

Entrepreneurs have the flexibility and the ability to do things that large companies simply cannot. Could a large company pull off a trick like Amyris, going from anti-malaria medicine to next-generation fuel?

One of the great things about young entrepreneurs is that they don't know that something can't be done. So they try something that's so audacious and usually end up pulling it off.

My advice to young entrepreneurs is not to accept defeat in the face of odds, and challenge negative forces with hope, self-confidence and conviction.

As counterintuitive as it sounds, 'speed to fail' should be every entrepreneur's motto. Success isn't born wholly-formed like Venus from a clamshell; it's developed through relentless trial and error.

Everywhere I go, I always look for creative entrepreneurs, whether it's artisans and craftsmen, small farmers and gardeners, or restaurateurs who use fresh, locally sourced ingredients. I admire the courage and self-reliance it takes to start your own business and make it succeed.

Most people who go into business for themselves and, therefore, believe they are entrepreneurs, are doomed to struggle because they don't have a true Entrepreneurial Perspective. They have a Technician's Perspective.

I learned the power of 'no.' No is really important. Entrepreneurs are told to say 'yes, yes, more, more.'

Entrepreneurs are like visionaries. One of the ways they run forward is by viewing the thing they're doing as something that's going to be the whole world.

Capitalists seem uninterested in capitalism, even as eager entrepreneurs can't get financing. Businesses and investors sound like the Ancient Mariner, who complained, 'Water, water everywhere - nor any drop to drink.'