Top 55 Start-Up Quotes

On Day One, a start-up is a faith-based initiative built on guesses.

It’s upsetting to me that you have to be a millionaire to invest in your friend’s start-up.

There are a lot of ways to make people not like you, but one of the most powerful – if least fair – is to be really, really successful. Nobody resents the guy who just lost his job. But the guy whose Internet start-up made him a billionaire at 25? That’s a whole different kettle of envy.

So, Israel, for all its glory, has failed as a social country because it has not built a strong society, but a very weak one. We succeeded militarily and financially, and we are the ‘Start-Up Nation’ – but when it comes to social issues, Israel has failed. It is very sad.

With scale, there always becomes this tension of, how do you keep the start-up philosophy?

I had no idea at all how to model, but people would start to follow me. So, I would go to these start-up companies and say, ‘I have all these followers… how can we work together?’

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.

Lease terms don’t fit start-up lives.

Start-up teams are always in flux, so, like all start-ups, we’re always talking to candidates for various key roles.

I design my start-up ventures around my own personal beliefs and values.

Start-up success is not a consequence of good genes or being in the right place at the right time. Success can be engineered by following the right process, which means it can be learned, which means it can be taught.

We build OYO with basis of building a team which is not just great for our segment, but we possibly have the best team any start-up can possibly have.

To be a designer today is to be an entrepreneur. Whether you’re a two-man operation in Shoreditch or a 3,000-person, vertically integrated brand, you need to have the wherewithal to run your business through investment, considering everything from start-up funds to your exit plan or what it takes to go public.

I’m rarely invited to start-up parties, but who cares about their trinkets and apps anyway?

Putting more money into families’ pockets will help them with the rising cost of living, and reducing the tax burden on business will help foster the entrepreneurial spirit of those who want to start-up or grow their own firms.

One of the best times at a start-up is when you’ve got the eight people in the basement eating Chinese food and everybody kind of shares knowledge, and you share in your successes and failures together, and you learn together.

There’s a historical view that adding process into a scrappy start-up kills innovation, but I’m a firm believer that you need process at some point to remain agile.

The basic parts, the start-up molecules, can be supplied in abundance and don’t have to be made by some elaborate process. That immediately makes things simpler.

Having a start-up is all about being able to see what works and change your idea.

Most start-up companies fail and it is smart public policy to help entrepreneurs increase their odds of succeeding. But, the biggest loss to our economy is not all the start-ups that didn’t make it: It’s the ones that might have been created but weren’t.

We’ve seen that there are a lot of people out there – teenagers in Topeka, housewives in Long Island, millionaire Internet start-up moguls – that all want to connect with each other about what it is to be human.

Every year, it seems to be there are more people right out of college who are willing to jump into a start-up.

The start-up life kept me busy and surfaced the problem of not being able to stay on top of my personal finances, which led me to invent Mint.com. I was working 80-hour weeks, and had done enough preliminary work and research to know I had a big idea: To make money management effortless and automated.

The myth of the peachfuzz billionaire has emerged. This new Horatio Alger typically launches his first start-up in middle school, and somewhere between the campus computer-science lab and a move to Palo Alto hacks up a Web site where users provide fun or useful content.

Like many start-up stories, mine has been rocky.

India and Israel share great relations, and with Israel known as a start-up country, there are a lot entrepreneurship opportunities to explore on social projects.

Back in 2001, my first start-up was mentioned in the ‘New York Times’ and ‘USA Today.’ I figured that would drive thousands of visitors to the site and tons of new business. Instead, only a handful of people visited our site, and not much business came of it at all.

With lower start-up costs and a vastly expanded market for online services, the result is a global economy that for the first time will be fully digitally wired-the dream of every cyber-visionary of the early 1990s, finally delivered, a full generation later.

Net neutrality rules ensure an equal playing field on the web for everyone, from the start-up to the tech giant.

It’s much harder these days as a start-up to do physical devices.

You know what this nation is? It’s a disruptive start-up. It was a group of rich guys that got together and said, ‘You know what? We’re going to break away from the other countries and start our own country.’

I think Amazon is the greatest start-up and the greatest company in the world. The way they are using new technologies is not just disrupting retail, it’s getting ready to disrupt everything.

Even though it was a start-up with fewer than 20 people, and I was pregnant with my first child, the best decision I’ve ever made was to join Google in 1999. Worst decision? Deciding to get a puppy and a bunny right when the baby came.

I came out of retirement to run a start-up. Historically, I seldom used all of my vacation time, and the last sick day I took was in 1992. I am a sick puppy.

NAPA has been with me from winning two Daytona 500s, to missing races with a new start-up team, and back to victory lane again. The relationship grew far past that of just a sponsor, but more of a partner and a friend.

Being a start-up has nothing to do with the numbers. It’s that everyone who works there has the chance to do everything and have an impact.

I started Verite on savings from three years working at Applebee’s in Times Square. I was a ridiculously good waitress. I was making more money than my brother, who worked at a start-up.

In 1999, I was running my first tech start-up and learning the Unreal Engine, the tool that would define my career as a game developer, when news of Columbine ground all work to a standstill.

In a start-up company, you basically throw out all assumptions every three weeks.

Politics is not my cup of tea. I would like to focus on research and education, and will also work to help start-up ecosystem.

In the start-up setting and in most companies, the output is action-oriented. You need to be getting things done and making decisions, often with limited information.

To be successful, you don’t have to have all this crazy start-up capital or a ton of knowledge. I think it’s actually helpful sometimes to not know all the rules because that way it’s easier to break them.

The biggest start-up successes – from Henry Ford to Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg – were pioneered by people from solidly middle-class backgrounds. These founders were not wealthy when they began. They were hungry for success, but knew they had a solid support system to fall back on if they failed.

I have seen the way a conglomerate works. My personal calling was in start-ups, so I built my own start-up.

There was a time and a place when a pure content start-up had a chance, and that time has passed.

It’s a special person – and personality – who can lead a start-up to soaring success and sustain that success for the long term. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg are star examples.

In September of 2001, I was living in the West Village of Manhattan, working from my home for a tech start-up.

If the founders of a start-up are considering selling it, I’d advise them to consider the synergies. Could the buyer give you access to something you don’t have now, like a certain technology? Would it make your life easier? Are you looking for a change? Things will change, so you have to be ready for that.

Incredibly, oil and gas companies don’t have to pay certain environmental costs that amount to small change to them, while an offshore wind project start-up is faced with fees that could mean the difference between building a wind farm and packing up and going home.

Netflix was my sixth start-up, and that point I decided I didn’t have it in me to start another company. At least that’s what I thought at the time.

Most troublesome is the legalization of ‘crowd funding,’ the ability of start-up companies to raise capital from small investors on the Internet.

Running a start-up is like eating glass. You just start to like the taste of your own blood.

For me, having greek yogurt and some granola is the perfect start-up breakfast because it has many benefits. Its filling, healthy and gives me energy to start my day.