Many entrepreneurs do not realize that many of the problems their businesses face today began yesterday, long before there was a business.
The technologists and entrepreneurs I know are generally good people. If they were given a choice, ‘Do your job and eliminate normal jobs’ or ‘Do your job and create abundant opportunities,’ they would choose the latter. Most of them would happily even take a small hit to do so. But this isn’t a choice they’re given.
We want people who work for us to be entrepreneurs. We like them to look at ideas. We like them to chase ideas. We like them to not be what I call a caretaker of an asset.
Tell young girls they can be anything, including entrepreneurs and self-made billionaires. Encourage your friends/daughters/female students/yourself to take a shot.
We are seeing entrepreneurs issuing their own blockchain-based tokens to raise money for their networks, sidestepping the traditional, exclusive world of venture capital altogether. The importance of this cannot be overstated – in this new world, there are no companies, just protocols.
As someone who understands what’s needed for entrepreneurs and start-up companies to succeed, I can tell you there is nothing more integral to their success than operating in a stable financial system.
Most entrepreneurs come up with a product, or they come up with an idea and they think they can be successful with it. But if they don’t know the financial side of their business and understand credit and working capital and what it takes money-wise, you can’t be successful. The product is just a product.
First Round has an opportunity: to create an entirely new kind of online publication, built for technology entrepreneurs, where they can learn how to build better companies.
There are two companies that the AI Fund has invested in – Woebot and Landing AI – and the AI Fund has a number of internal teams working on new projects. We usually bring in people as employees, work with them to turn ideas into startups, then have the entrepreneurs go into the startup as founders.
There’s a lot of entrepreneurs out here who are in school, who just don’t know what’s next, or can’t figure out what direction they should go in. And me graduating motivates them.
Lots of entrepreneurs don’t want to be hassled by a board of directors early on. The entrepreneurs want to control the company, don’t want to be responsible to a board, or don’t want to waste time communicating with board members. This is a classic error of thinking about the early stage board incorrectly.
A common mistake among new entrepreneurs who have raised large rounds is that they have essentially infinite resources.
Entrepreneurs don’t have a regular 9-5 work day. They don’t take vacations. They live and breathe their business 24/7 and wear many different hats.
Internet marketing entrepreneurs have truly opened my eyes to just how important a quick turnaround time can be. Often times, an interview they conduct with me today is online by the next morning. The interviewee is then able to start making money less than 24 hours after the initial interview.
We, as entrepreneurs, can be held responsible for our actions every single day, not every election cycle.
I got an email from the Crown Prince of Norway asking me to talk at a summit for young Norwegian entrepreneurs. I ran to my wife and was like, ‘Hey! I got an email from the Prince of Norway!’
I have started or run several companies and spent time with dozens of entrepreneurs over the years. Virtually none of them, in my experience, made meaningful personnel or resource-allocation decisions based on incentives or policies.
Health care costs blunt the competitive edge of American entrepreneurs, from the auto industry to internet start-ups.
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 bring to business… creativity.
Philanthropists can learn important lessons from business entrepreneurs. They both spend their time solving problems. And to be successful, they both must overcome physical challenges and create self-sustaining operations. And ultimately, they must allow people to take action for their own benefit.
Entrepreneurs create value; I wanted to create ideas that became machines for making value.
Founders go wrong when they start to believe their business plan will materialize as written. I advise entrepreneurs to burn their business plan – it’s simply too dangerous to the health of your business.
Inasmuch as there is a useful purpose to what we do as VCs, I tend to think it’s our duty not only to mentor entrepreneurs and executive teams, but also to learn from them and the others involved. We can then pass on lessons to aid the startup ecosystem and help businesses succeed and grow their impact.
If people want to code, and they want to be entrepreneurs, there’s opportunities for them to do that.
America glories in its tradition of the self-made individual. Political candidates compete to be a friend to entrepreneurs, and policymakers, imagining the next Microsoft or Google, design laws to back the innovator in the garage.
I get the impression that most Chinese entrepreneurs are so focussed on doing what they need to do to succeed in the Chinese market – which is a big enough challenge even for the established players – that nobody is thinking much about the longer run or the bigger global picture.
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.
Every weekend I would take a train to Delhi and sneak into startup events. I really enjoyed meeting entrepreneurs who were solving big problems. They were way smarter than me. I knew this is where I had to be.
What many single male 23-year-old entrepreneurs don’t realize is that family tech is a ‘big freaking business’. As in, trillions of dollars.
When President Obama speaks about raising taxes on the rich, he speaks about high-income employees and small business owners, not entrepreneurs who build big businesses.
By simply capitalizing on core strengths and knowledge, companies and entrepreneurs can engage in an emerging business model that will enable them to create – and demonstrate – real, sustainable social impact in society.
Entrepreneurs, guys that start businesses, grow with them. It’s more painful than it would appear.
The best programmers and internet entrepreneurs are in the Bay Area. Don’t kid yourself about that, not even for a second.
The Internet has become an integral part of everyday life precisely because it has been an open-to-all land of opportunity where entrepreneurs, thinkers and innovators are free to try, fail and then try again.
Successful entrepreneurs develop products that inspire their passion. They have to. It’s that passion that gets them through the long, arduous, uncertain and frightening early days of a start-up.
For myself, I never thought that I’d ever be able to even buy a house. Sometimes when you don’t have it, and you’re not surrounded my entrepreneurs, you don’t think about it.
I support raising the federal minimum wage. What I’ve said is I don’t want San Diego to be at a competitive disadvantage, particularly for our small businesses and our entrepreneurs to have one set of wages for San Diego and a different set of wages for surrounding cities.
Finding entrepreneurs from diverse and international backgrounds is a top priority for us at Y Combinator.
McDonalds. Apple. Starbucks. They were all small businesses, owned by entrepreneurs and people with vision.
Some people are serial entrepreneurs and want to just move on to the next thing. They just want to clean the slate and start from scratch. I feel that sometimes, too, and the way that we do that here is we build things inside Shutterstock: we launch new products all the time.
If I can encourage other women to think about setting up their own businesses and being entrepreneurs and making a contribution then I think that’s a good thing.
I’ve known entrepreneurs who were not great salespeople, or didn’t know how to code, or were not particularly charismatic leaders. But I don’t know of any entrepreneurs who have achieved any level of success without persistence and determination.
We think of the Techstars product as not really the accelerator but the network. That’s what entrepreneurs should be valuing here. I think it’s the most undervalued thing that many entrepreneurs don’t get.
One of the things that struck me is how authentic ‘Shark Tank’ is. I don’t know how more real it can be. You have no prior knowledge about the entrepreneurs.
My grandfathers on both sides were entrepreneurs.
ROI is full of talented entrepreneurs and professionals, and we want to help each of them tap into the incredible power the collective has to offer and to contribute what they can.
Just as entrepreneurs developed America, they can develop other countries, too.
The deciding factor of why some entrepreneurs are successful and others fail is not limited to your DNA or your education; it is about the actions you take as the leader of your business.
