Being a great founder or early team member is a difficult dialectic – you have to be a bit overconfident, and a big ego isn’t always a bad thing. To change the world requires pushing really, really hard and believing you and your team know something others don’t.
I was always interested in animals, but when I was little, animal behavior was still a new science. It was available to become a veterinarian, it was available to study biology, but not specifically animal behavior. In the ’60s, Jane Goodall was the founder of this new science.
Traditionally, all the kings of Saudi Arabia have been sons of the founder of Saudi Arabia, and they’ve gone from one son to the next.
I did not claim that speciation occurs only in founder populations.
Some years ago, I was invited to speak in Houston, Texas. They said I was a founder of ‘postmodern theatre’. So I said to my office, ‘This is ridiculous for me to go and speak about postmodern theatre when I don’t know what it means, but… they’re paying me a lot of money, so I’ll go.’
As a founder, you are a very active component of your company.
David Harrington, who’s the violinist and founder of Kronos, is a super open-minded and adventurous guy.
In talking to founder after founder; I’ve heard almost visceral reactions to working for companies, even very cool ones with great things to work on and lots of opportunity, like Facebook, Google, or consulting firms.
I feel that the best companies are started not because the founder wanted a company but because the founder wanted to change the world… If you decide you want to found a company, you maybe start to develop your first idea. And hire lots of workers.
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.
There are some things that money can’t buy: peace of mind, for starters, and lean muscle mass. Neither the Queen of England nor the founder of Microsoft can put in an order for either one.
As a female founder and CEO, it is important to me to support other women as they build their businesses.
One of my mentors early on was Eli Harari, the founder of SanDisk, who happened to be a friend of my dad’s.
I was first hired at Staples in 1992, by company founder Tom Stemberg and eventual CEO Ron Sargent, to be the first director of marketing and merchandising for the catalog business.
Getting over the stigma of needing to appear as if I do it all myself took about 12 months. I finally realized that the only way to be a successful, happy mother, founder, wife, and daughter was to accept the help that was being offered to me.
If you ask a founder how their company is doing, they always say, ‘Oh it’s great. We’re totally crushing it,’ and that’s almost never true.
The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.
Any dispassionate observer would recognize that on Day One, a start-up has no customers, and unless the founder is a true domain expert, he or she can only guess about the customer, problem, and business model.
As the founder and former chief executive of two publicly traded companies, I have had a great deal of exposure to how debt markets work.
It’s easier to coach a technical founder how to be CEO and manage a business than it is to teach a professional CEO the nuances of that particular business.
In every investment, before I get involved or invest, I always see what the mindset of the founder, the CEO, is.
I don’t want to be the guy that’s sitting here, calling somebody and telling them their dream. I want to be in the seat of the founder.
How can BJP be anti-Bangla when BJP founder Syama Prasad Mookerjee himself was a Bengali?
The founder of the BDS movement is blatantly anti-Semitic.
Our business is all about helping someone – a founder, a CEO – building a great business. It’s not about seeing our names in the press.
I’m in a different position than most CEO’s. I’m a founder. I’m not a hired CEO. Now, I can be fired by the board, but most CEO’s are hired by the board.
I mean I wasn’t a founder in the sense that I contributed anything scientifically but in the sense that I signed the corporation papers and, and owned founder’s stock.
Deciding whether or not to bring in an outside CEO is one of the most gut-wrenching decisions that a founder will ever need to make.
Lastly, his tomb shall list and founder in the troughs of grass. And none shall speak his name.
First and deadliest of all is a founder’s unwavering belief that he or she understands who the customers will be, what they need, and how to sell it to them.
I was an executive running a pretty substantial group before becoming CEO, and I had no idea what it was like. When something goes wrong, people say, ‘It’s all your fault.’ Your reaction is, ‘It’s not my fault.’ But what do you mean? I was the founder, I hired everybody in the company, I was managing it.
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