Words matter. These are the best Vivek Wadhwa Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
No matter how well things are going, failure and disaster are just around the corner. So celebrate the good, but be ready for the bad.
The most valuable lesson I learned in dealing with the ups and downs was to invest in my employees – to do all I could for them when the times were good.
You may not believe in anything called a work-life balance, but your body certainly does. You need to monitor and nurture your body.
I advise all of the entrepreneurs that I know to attend at least one entrepreneurship event every week. The worst thing an entrepreneur can do is to confine his or herself to a cubby hole.
Building a company isn’t that different from climbing a big mountain. You need people helping you traverse treacherous paths and to lift you up when you fall.
The natives of Silicon Valley learned long ago that when you share your knowledge with someone else, one plus one usually equals three. You both learn each other’s ideas, and you come up with new ones.
Whenever I write about immigration, I hear heart-wrenching stories of computer workers who are unemployed and facing severe hardship.
My advice to fledgling entrepreneurs is always the same: build a company that you plan to be with for the next 10 years – that is the best way to increase your chances of success.
Business executives need to start by spelling out and communicating their values. Then they need to lead by example. This means getting rid of the bad apples and declining opportunities that bring instant wealth at the cost of selling one’s soul.
Hiring foreigners is more expensive and more difficult than hiring locals, because of the visa fees and long lead times for visa processing. And companies face a backlash by anti-immigrant groups for hiring foreigners. So they do it only because they have to.
Once we increase the proportion of women in technical roles, the challenge is to retain them and ease the transition to senior positions.
You will find that every successful entrepreneur has suffered many setbacks. These entrepreneurs just forget to mention these when they are doing interviews with the ‘Wall Street Journal’ or Bloomberg TV.
In the U.S., PC-makers have no incentive to lower prices because it kills their profit margins. They keep adding new features like high-end retina displays and faster processors to justify their high prices.
What the tech industry often forgets is that with age comes wisdom. Older workers are usually better at following direction, mentoring, and leading.
What you want in a mentor is someone who truly cares for you and who will look after your interests and not just their own. When you do come across the right person to mentor you, start by showing them that the time they spend with you is worthwhile.
Student loan debt is the reason I don’t advise students who want to become entrepreneurs to apply to elite, expensive colleges. They can be as successful if they go to a relatively inexpensive public college.
If you don’t have savings, and your co-founders are as poor as you are, and if Mom and Dad won’t loan you money, then your best bet is to find people that know you – your friends. If they, too, won’t help, then you’re stuck seeking out angel investors.
Big companies such as Google and Facebook buy startups at ridiculously high prices – not for their products, but for their people.
I used to have an obsession with building businesses and forgot about building health. I was focused on the destination instead of the journey. I caution you to not do the same.
During the dot-com days, one could take just about any company public and reap fortunes. All you had to do was to make sky-high projections for growth, say you were in the Internet space, and go along with unscrupulous investment bankers and their analysts.
Most business schools are geared toward churning out investment bankers and management consultants.
Entrepreneurship is like a computer game in which you have to master every level before achieving success. Startups repeatedly stumble and have to go back to the drawing board. The best way to skip some levels and to increase the odds of survival is to learn from others who have already played the game.
A key to achieving success is to assemble a strong and stable management team.
The stereotypical successful entrepreneur is Mark Zuckerberg – the young college dropout who dreamed up a crazy idea while in his dorm room.
The mentor-mentee relationship is ideally like that of the guru and disciple: motivated by the desire of the guru to impart knowledge to the disciple.
The fastest way to get kicked out of a venture capitalist’s office is to say that you want to build a business that grows steadily, focuses on employees, and creates wealth over the long term. Entrepreneurs with such ambitions are considered pariahs.
The goal should be to build a sustainable lifestyle business that does good for employees and customers – and that steadily builds wealth.
The lesson is, because there will be many lemons in life, to learn to make the proverbial lemonade – and be open and honest. That’s the best way of doing damage control and positioning yourself for success.
My message to students is that if you want to become an entrepreneur and save the world, definitely don’t skip college. But go to a school that you can afford. You’ll be freed from the chains of debt and succeed on your own ambition and merit.
I realized that, after tasting entrepreneurship, I had become unfit for the corporate world. There was no turning back. The only regret I had was having wasted my life in the corporate world for so long.
The IPO is no exit for the entrepreneur; it’s the start of purgatory.
In my first company, Seer Technologies, where I was chief technology officer, we shied away from the media. We watched every word and were guarded in front of journalists.
In the technology world, you have to execute fast or you’re out of business.
The fact is that you are never too old to innovate.
An open-minded and diverse population that readily shares information, encourages experimentation, accepts failure and dispenses with formality and hierarchy is what makes Silicon Valley the successful hub that it is.
