Startups Quotes

Do you know great minds enjoy excellence, average minds love mediocrity and small minds adore comfort zones?

~ Onyi Anyado

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

~ Kate O'neill

We are not creators; only combiners of the created. Invention isn't about new ingredients, but new recipes. And innovations taste the best.

~ Ryan Lilly

You do not necessarily have to get before you do but when you do, you shall get

~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

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

~ Ryan Lilly

..determination is the most important quality in a founder, open-mindedness and willingness to change your idea are key, and all startups face rejection at first.

~ Jessica Livingston

The most important thing is not to let fundraising get you down. Startups live or die on morale. If you let the difficulty of raising money destroy your morale, it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

~ Paul Graham

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

~ Ryan Lilly

Jean-Baptiste Say may have coined the term 'entrepreneur' but he totally missed the opportunity to put it on a t-shirt and sell it.

~ Ryan Lilly

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.

~ Shunryu Suzuki

The goal - at least the way I think about entrepreneurship - is you realize one day that you can't really work anyone else. You have to start your own thing. It almost doesn't matter what the thing is. We had six different business plan changes, and then the last one was PayPal.If that one didn't work out, if we still had the money and the people, obviously we would not have given up. We would have iterated on the business model and done something else. I don't think there was ever clarity as to who we were until we knew it was working. By then, we'd figured out our PR pitch and told everyone what we do and who we are. But between the founding and the actual PayPal, it was just like this tug-of-war where it was like, We're trying this, this week. Every week you go to investors and say, We're doing this, exactly this. We're really focused. We're going to be huge. The next week you're like, That was a lie.

~ Jessica Livingston

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.

~ Ellen Ullman

Julius used to say that we stood on the shoulders of giants. To me it always seemed like we were in their shadow. It never occurred to me that we were the shadow that they projected, and that one day we would rise up and overwhelm them

~ Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

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.

~ Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

Try to imagine the calamity of that: Zack, age twenty-eight, with no management experience, gets training from Dave, a weekend rock guitarist, on how to apply a set of fundamentally unsound psychological principles as a way to manipulate the people who report to him.

~ Dan Lyons

A lot of the machines that Google is built on—commodity is the polite word for them—they're regular PCs and so they're not always the most reliable.

~ Jessica Livingston

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.

~ Jessica Livingston

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

~ Sharad Vivek Sagar

For any creative thought to be contagious, it must first be worthy of a sneeze.

~ Ryan Lilly

My best ideas come in the shower, where I’m showered with water, but also ideas.

~ Ryan Lilly

Zen is not some fancy, special art of living. Our teaching is just to live, always in reality, in its exact sense. To make our effort, moment after moment, is our way. In an exact sense, the only thing we actually can study in our life is that on which we are working in each moment. We cannot even study Buddha’s words.”-“So we should be concentrated with our full mind and body on what we do; and we should be faithful, subjectively and objectively, to ourselves, and especially to our feelings. Even when you do not feel so well, it is better to express how you feel without any particular attachment or intention. So you may say, “Oh, I am sorry, I do not feel well.

~ Shunryu Suzuki

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.

~ Shunryu Suzuki

If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together African Proverb

~ Paul Oberschneider

If you you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together. African Proverb

~ Paul Oberschneider

Some people say, What difference does it make what color the winemaker is that made the wine? Judge the wines off their own merit. Like, of course. And I do believe that my wine is judged off its own merit. But the fact is that when you walk into places and people can't believe that you're the principal or you're the owner or you made the wine, it's mind-blowing to me some days. It's like, wow. That's why we need to continue talking about it.

~ Andre Hueston Mack

Entrepreneurship is a scary city! NO water- dig wells, NO food- plant trees, NO family- build one, NO identity- prove yourself.

~ Jasleen Kaur Gumber

We’ve all been in positions where we felt out of place or not accepted for whatever reason. For me, that’s been my life. I’ve always been that person that stood out. And what makes you an outcast is what makes you unique, and you should harness that. Being a black sheep gives you creative license to do sh*t differently.

~ Andre Hueston Mack

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.

~ Andre Hueston Mack

I feel like you can’t judge a book by its cover, that’s always been the story of my life. I can walk into any restaurant and people would be floored to learn that I know what I do about wine, let alone that I ran one of the best wine programs in the world.

~ Andre Hueston Mack

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

~ Alejandro Cremades

The best entrepreneurs are not the best visionaries. The greatest entrepreneurs are incredible salespeople. They know how to tell an amazing story that will convince talent and investors to join in on the journey.

~ Alejandro Cremades

Learning to embrace and savor rejection is one of the best things that entrepreneurs can do. Launching a startup is the time to find your ever-optimistic inner child again.

~ Alejandro Cremades

Business is still more often about whom you know, not what you know.

~ Alejandro Cremades

Ideas are meaningless without a masterful execution.

~ Alejandro Cremades

Don’t expect investors to be throwing millions on the table for you to go off and buy a bigger house, get a new car, party half the week away, and generally upgrade your lifestyle.

~ Alejandro Cremades

If you want to glide toward money, you have to make sure your message is clear as a bell, and you need to ensure that you have a unified team capable of communicating it.

~ Alejandro Cremades

The goal - at least the way I think about entrepreneurship - is you realize one day that you can't really work anyone else. You have to start your won thing. It almost doesn't matter what the thing is. We had six different business plan changes, and then the last one was PayPal.If that one didn't work out, if we still had the money and the people, obviously we would not have given up. We would have iterated on the business model and done something else. I don't think there was ever clarity as to who we were until we knew it was working. By then, we'd figured out our PR pitch and told everyone what we do and who we are. But between the founding and the actual PayPal, it was just like this tug-of-war where it was like, We're trying this, this week. Every week you go to investors and say, We're doing this, exactly this. We're really focused. We're going to be huge. The next week you're like, That was a lie.

~ Jessica Livingston

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.

~ Alejandro Cremades

This is what entrepreneurship is all about. You start off operating from a garage. And, end up, operating from a car.

~ Sharad Vivek Sagar

If you take one typewriter and build 100, you’ve made horizontal progress. If you have a typewriter and build a word processor, you have made vertical progress.

~ Peter Thiel