Top 133 Startups Quotes

I love working with really early stage startups where the outcome is still in doubt. Maybe they’ll go on to greatness, or maybe they’ll never get off the runway at all.

There’s nothing wrong with raising venture capital. Many lean startups are ambitious and are able to deploy large amounts of capital. What differentiates them is their disciplined approach to determining when to spend money: after the fundamental elements of the business model have been empirically validated.

All throughout my life I have been deeply immersed in startups, either because I was running one or investing in them or helping them.

It’s amazing that about 10% of startups couldn’t be found on Facebook because they had common names or names that weren’t searchable.

In Europe, there is a lower instance of startups because there’s a permanent fear of failure. Everyone fears failure because it is this permanent black mark against your name, whereas in the U.S., failure seems to be par for the course.

We now understand the distinction between startups – who search for a business model – versus existing companies – that execute a business plan.

Silicon Valley’s long-running track record of creating globally disruptive startups is the envy of the world.

Don’t let a lack of big company names on your resume get you down, but also, don’t let it feed a Silicon Valley ego. Oftentimes, the best candidates come from startups or smaller companies. It shows they are open to risk and can keep up with the long hours and occasional harsh demands.

Access to capital is important for all firms, but it’s particularly vital for startups and young firms, which often lack a sufficient stream of earnings to increase employment and internally finance capital spending.

The most important thing in startups is getting a product to market, as imperfect as it may be, and then iterating on it and continually making it better. A first rev of a site that has a few typos may not be perfect, but it was the start of something that I deeply believed in.

It’s often lost in most Silicon Valley startups, the importance of storytelling when most people are thinking about they assemble their team and the critical functions that the team needs to be successful. Storytelling is normally not on the list.

It helps tremendously to have operating startup experience when advising startups. It is much easier to tell people how to talk to customers, build product, manage an engineering team, raise money from investors, and talk to press when you’ve done it before yourself.

I’ve been lucky enough to be involved in a number of great startups, including eBay and Wikia as an entrepreneur and LinkedIn and Paypal as an investor.

While ‘The Owner’s Manual’ is not a formula for guaranteed success by any means, we’re confident it will help reduce the failure rate of most startups that use our Customer Development process.

Startups can be the most conservative organizations in the world. We spend so much energy nurturing our delicate egos against naysayers and self-doubt that we can hardly admit mistakes. This is especially true of first-time CEOs.

Team sports is the best for bonding. These sports lessons are also true for startups. You want to be at the top of every endeavour, but you win some and you lose some. As a team, however, you always pump each other up and move forward.

Successful entrepreneurship takes complete dedication and careful strategizing along with market analysis. Plus, successful startups provide countless benefits to a healthy economy and consumers in need.

Silicon Valley has evolved a critical mass of engineers and venture capitalists and all the support structure – the law firms, the real estate, all that – that are all actually geared toward being accepting of startups.

As the tech industry continues to grow and sprout successful startups across the country, it is important that we understand our responsibility to affect positive change in our communities.

I think the mistake people make most often when they invest in other kinds of startups is they say, ‘This is totally different.’ And so the things that matter, like making a product that people desperately want, like talking to customers, they throw this out the window. That is a recipe for heartache and tears.

For a lot of people, one of the reasons they don’t like to work for founders of startups is that they can be sensitive and protective around what they’ve built. You have an emotional attachment to the early marketing and technology materials, and you don’t want to hear that anything’s wrong with them.

Doing startups is all about making mistakes.

Jon Miller would be amazing for Yahoo because he is extremely good at building display advertising businesses and buying young startups.

I think co-working spaces, incubators, and accelerators outside of the Bay Area do a lot to foster a local startup scene – which is really important for early founders, but I also think that exposure to the Bay Area is extremely valuable for startups.

Not all startups are alike. One of the key ways they differ is in the relationship between a startup’s new product and its market.

There’s a lot of glorification of startups and being a founder. People brush the failures under the rug, but that’s the worst thing you can do. You kind of have to face it head on.

I focus on consumer Internet. Sometimes it’s a working prototype; sometimes it’s an idea on a napkin. I don’t do a ton of deals a year, and I really like working with startups – it’s the only way I can invest. It fits my ADD brain.

Most of the largest software companies in the world today are based on Oracle, and they were once startups.

Very ambitious startups often take a long time to work – or sometimes they take a very long time to look ambitious.

Because most startups are lean and scrappy organizations consisting of a limited number of people and supported by an even smaller number of resources, startups cannot afford to have any slackers on board. When you fail, you cause an ‘epic failure,’ and when you win, everyone in the company knows about it.

Everything’s mobile these days. Let’s go mo-bile! But really, that’s just an IQ test. When you see bold new startups with nothing but a desktop strategy, you know they just don’t get it, and you move on.

Quality and a great product matters, in startups, and in accelerators.

I have met with hundreds of young fashion designers, hundreds of fashion startups, hundreds of CEOs and business leaders. All I do is get to ask questions of professionals in the industry. I learn from every conversation. It is the best education I could have.

We need to encourage investors to invest in high-technology startups.

Startups on the inside are always badly broken.

I am a partner at CrunchFund, a venture capital firm with investments in many startups around the world. I am also a limited partner in many other venture funds which have their own startup investments.

In the political world, big established failing systems control the rules, suck in more and more resources rather than go bust, make it almost impossible for startups to contribute and so on.

For almost the first year of The Muse’s life, I would do 5 to 8 networking events a week. And I don’t necessarily think that’s the right path for everyone, but I realized that as an entrepreneur, one of my strengths was finding the right people who could help us. I didn’t come into startups with any network.

It’s much easier for non-Indian companies to raise capital because they have profitable markets elsewhere. You might call it capital dumping, predatory pricing, or anti-WTO, but it’s a very unfair playing field for Indian startups.

Technology does more than delight, entertain and make our lives more convenient, it’s also an agent for social good. That is why it’s important for tech startups to stay informed about, and make a mark on, policies that impact them.

I think ‘Settlers of Catan’ is such a well-designed board game – it’s the board game of entrepreneurship – that I made a knockoff called ‘Startups of Silicon Valley.’ It’s literally – it’s the same rules but just a different skin set to it.

Cultivating a global incubator network would help people from all backgrounds bring creative ideas to market and launch startups that generate more jobs – and would also align to the growing interest among youth for entrepreneurship.

In Silicon Valley, there are a lot of startups using computer vision for agriculture or shopping – there are a lot for clothes shopping. At Baidu, for example, if you find a picture of a movie star, we actually use facial recognition to identify that movie star and then tell you things like their age and hobbies.

I think the Indian AI ecosystem is growing rapidly. A lot of Indian entrepreneurs reach out to me seeking feedback about startups and products. And some of them have very interesting business ideas.

By definition, startups are not constrained by the limits of established company culture. And so they push boundaries and develop new technologies and ways of doing things.

Slapping a catchy acronym like the JOBS Act on a piece of legislation makes it more difficult for politicians to oppose it – and indeed that’s what happened with the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act.