Startups Quotes

In 2007, Stanford Business School Advisory committee asserted that self awareness was the most important attribute a leader should develop. The challenge for the modern entrepreneur is to take that path.

In chaos is where learning happens the most.

Paul Buchheit: Then you have what we do with PCs, and that's technically pretty challenging—to take this big network of machines that are unreliable and build a big, reliable storage system out of it.

You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible. Most startups that fail do it because they fail at one of these. A startup that does all three will probably succeed.' [Paul Graham]

Entrepreneurs pay the price of a road less traveled, while everyone else takes the freeway and perpetually misses their own exit.

When you were making excuses someone else was making enterprise.

The challenge for the entrepreneur is to find your passion and make fear history.

Part of the reward of entrepreneurship lies in having the courage to believe in yourself and take action.

Fail early, fail often.

It’s a myth that an entrepreneur cannot work in a corporation. It’s all in the mindset.

I enjoy self-publishing & sending publishers rejection letters. They're like, 'Who is this guy?' And I'm like, 'the end of your industry.

When strategy, culture, and brand harmonize, they amplify one another and resonate loud and clear.

One of the best ways to attract capital is to outperform the competition.

Even in zazen you will lose yourself. When you become sleepy, or when your mind starts to wander about, you lose yourself. When your legs become painful—“Why are my legs so painful?”—you lose yourself. ”-“You just sit in the midst of the problem; when you are a part of the problem, or when the problem is a part of you, there is no problem, because you are the problem itself. The problem is you yourself. If this is so, there is no problem.”-“When you start to wander about in some delusion which is something apart from you yourself, then your surroundings are not real anymore, and your mind is not real anymore. If you yourself are deluded, then your surroundings are also a misty, foggy delusion. Once you are in the midst of delusion, there is no end to delusion. You will be involved in deluded ideas one after another. Most people live in delusion, involved in their problem, trying to solve their problem. But just to live is actually to live in problems. And to solve the problem is to be a part of it, to be one with it.

What did journalists know of tech, anyway? Who gave a damn about the press? We were the Good Guys. Changing the World. Doing the Important Stuff.

Entrepreneur, if you're going to start up, make sure you start up with excellence in mind

Timing, perseverance, and ten years of trying will eventually make you look like an overnight success.

At the end of the day, it's just grape juice. No one needs anything that I make. The last thing we need is another wine on the shelf. So that just makes me grateful for the people who do enjoy it.

A product in the marketplace is the result of thought in an inner space and action more than the common place.

Entrepreneur, if your're going to start up, make sure you start up with excellence in mind.

Even though you read much Zen literature, you must read each sentence with a fresh mind. You should not say, “I know what Zen is,” or “I have attained enlightenment.” This is also the real secret of the arts: always be a beginner.”-“When you are sitting in the middle of your own problem, which is more real to you: your problem or you yourself? The awareness that you are here, right now, is the ultimate fact. ”-“Knowing that your life is short, to enjoy it day after day, moment after moment, is the life of “form is form and emptiness is emptiness.”-“You may feel as if you are doing something special, but actually it is only the expression of your true nature; it is the activity which appeases your inmost desire. But as long as you think you are practicing zazen for the sake of something, that is not true practice.”-“The most important thing is to forget all gaining ideas, all dualistic ideas. In other words, just practice zazen in a certain posture.

Making a product is just an activity, making a profit on a product is the achievement.

Ideas are meaningless without a masterful execution.

Business success requires business preparation. You don't have to be a master tactician, but you do need to have a plan in place. This plan will act as a foundation for everything you want to achieve.

It is best to be the CEO; it is satisfactory to be an early employee, maybe the fifth or sixth or perhaps the tenth. Alternately, one may become an engineer devising precious algorithms in the cloisters of Google and its like. Otherwise, one becomes a mere employee. A coder of websites at Facebook is no one in particular. A manager at Microsoft is no one. A person (think woman) working in customer relations is a particular type of no one, banished to the bottom, as always, for having spoken directly to a non-technical human being. All these and others are ways for strivers to fall by the wayside — as the startup culture sees it — while their betters race ahead of them. Those left behind may see themselves as ordinary, even failures.

Entrepreneur, if you're going to start up, make sure you start up with excellence in mind.

Every day is full of opportunities, but an opportunity is full of only so many days.

Entrepreneurship is like a weighing machine whose load content should tilt towards passion to solve a pressing need, more than passion to make money.

I’m a firm believer that most people who do great things are doing them for the first time. Returning to my theory of hiring, I’d rather have someone all fired up to do something for the first time than someone who’s done it before and isn’t that excited to do it again. You rarely go wrong giving someone who is high potential the shot.

An "eye" on the vision is more important than an "I" on the vision.