Entrepreneurial Quotes

Our region's economy was built upon their entrepreneurial spirit, and our economy still depends on the continued success of the enterprises they have worked so hard to create. ~ Doc Hastings

When you have an idea, a classic entrepreneurial impulse is to hold the idea close to you and not tell people and that's almost always a mistake. ~ Reid Hoffman

We are shifting from a managerial society to an entrepreneurial society. ~ John Naisbitt

A little-known company with a realistic framework that appeals to entrepreneurial employees is going to be more attractive than a famous company that treats its people like disposable assets. ~ Reid Hoffman

[We need] to nurture the entrepreneurial spirit and the tremendous untapped potential in our prisons. ~ Jeff Smith

The most adorable thing about Toronto is that she remains fiercely aloof and indifferent to the fads and entrepreneurial fevers of her lovers. She is intractably herself, admissive to the most vagrant, sober in a way that gets misinterpreted as stodginess. Her generosity extends to the meek as well as the gold diggers. Mercifully, she doesn't give a hoot about our portraits of her, but just waits, patiently, for our affection and citizenship. ~ Pier Giorgio Di Cicco

When you're invested in your own business, you're going to run it better. When people are financially responsible for whether their store succeeds, they're going to have that kind of entrepreneurial spirit that's harder to get if headquarters is running things. ~ Fred DeLuca

Capitalism does a number of things very well: it helps create an entrepreneurial spirit; it gets people motivated to come up with new ideas, and that's a good thing. ~ Bernie Sanders

What I'm trying to do is get this message out about self-empowerment, entrepreneurial spirit and true Americanism - the way we were when we changed the world, when Edison was alone, failing his 2,000th time on the lightbulb. ~ Glenn Beck

Every small business will give you an entrepreneurial way of looking at things. I guarantee you that for every plant that closes, if you gave it to one small-business person in that community, he or she would find a way to make it work. The small-business attitude is you always find a way to make it work. ~ Hamdi Ulukaya

According to Aman Mehndiratta, Persuasion of the idea and planning the strategy is the key activity for every business not only for the entrepreneurial business. But there goes an extra emphasis on the business started as an entrepreneurship. As here, everything including decisions, responsibilities, failures, success, appreciation, and criticism belongs to you only. Proper strategy and planning are necessary if one wants to avoid the future risks. ~ Aman Mehndiratta

Entrepreneurial employees possess what eBay CEO John Donahoe calls the founder mind-set. As he put it to us, People with the founder mind-set drive change, motivate people, and just get stuff done. ~ Reid Hoffman

I wanted to be an editor or a journalist, I wasn't really interested in being an entrepreneur, but I soon found I had to become an entrepreneur in order to keep my magazine going. ~ Richard Branson

Regardless of whether one subscribes to the aims of the four movements whose stories we have told, there is much to appreciate about them as movements. They have overcome schisms; disbandment; leadership scandals; and/or the deaths of their founders. They have developed a highly innovative strategy - bypassing the state - to overcome the obstacles that their ideological strictness; ambitious agendas; and reluctance to compromise present. They have shown a strong entrepreneurial spirit in building effective social service agencies, medical facilities, schools, and businesses that often put the state's efforts to shame. While they are not the Christian militias, al-Qaeda cells, or Jewish extremist groups whose terrorism has attracted much attention, the Muslim Brotherhood, Shas, Comunione e Liberazione, and the Salvation Army, with their strategy of rebuilding society, one institution at a time, may well prove more successful in sacralizing their societies than movements that use violence. ~ Robert V. Robinson

If you look at the fact that the best chance we have for a good economy is the private sector. The government cannot create jobs. If the government could create jobs, then Communism would have worked. But didn't work. So what we have to do is allow the private sector and the entrepreneurial spirit to lead us back to a job-filled recovery. ~ Tim Scott

True philanthropy requires a disruptive mindset, innovative thinking and a philosophy driven by entrepreneurial insights and creative opportunities. ~ Naveen Jain

When you run an entrepreneurial business, you have hurry sickness - you don't look back, you advance and consolidate. But it is such fun. ~ Anita Roddick

Senior faculty nowadays similarly squirm when former 'dunderheads' return to campus to lecture on their prizewinning screenplay or to cut the ribbon for a building funded by their entrepreneurial acumen. How did such dullards metamorphose into geniuses? ~ Mark C. Carnes

The 5 Clues to Spotting the Next Starbucks
They permanently change people's habits.
They're copycats.
Their success is validated by the competition.
They are driven by the founder's vision and passion.
They have superb entrepreneurial management and execution. ~ Mark Tier

You must fall in love with what you do, because being an entrepreneur is a lot of hard work, and overcoming a lot of adversity. From that love will come the dedication that will get you out of bed at 4 a.m. because of a great idea you just had and get you to work till 11 p.m. and not feel tired. ~ Ken Field

Entrepreneurial leadership requires the ability to move quickly when opportunity presents itself. ~ Brian Tracy

I'm more encouraged by the saplings: new music groups, tiny new venues, entrepreneurial musician-composers who aren't waiting to be discovered but are instead building their own Establishment. ~ David Edelstein

Managing your small failures (iterations) and major failures (pivots) as part of the entrepreneurial development process to save you from a fatal failure that has been the hallmark of most entrepreneurial journeys. ~ Peter A. Baskerville

It's more difficult, you know, to bring about positive change than it is to make money. It's much easier to make money, because it's a much easier way to measure success - the bottom line. When it comes to social consequences, they've got all different people acting in different ways, very difficult to even have a proper criterion of success. So, it's a difficult task. Why not use an entrepreneurial, rather than a bureaucratic, approach. As long as people genuinely care for the people they're trying to help, they can actually do a lot of good. ~ George Soros

People know us best for our entrepreneurial success as the founders of Three Dog Bakery; what they don't know is that we owe it all to a gigantic deaf dog named Gracie. But even though Gracie sowed the seeds of our success, this isn't a book about "making it." This is the story of a dog who was born with the cards stacked against her, but whose passionate, joyful nature helped her turn what could have been a dog's life into a victory of the canine spirit - and, in the process, save two guys who thought they were saving her. ~ Dan Dye

As every slumdweller knew, there were three main ways out of poverty: finding an entrepreneurial niche, as the Husains had found in garbage; politics and corruption, in which Asha placed her hopes; and education. ~ Katherine Boo

Strategic planning is the continuous process of making present entrepreneurial (risk-taking) decisions systematically and with the greatest knowledge of their futurity; organizing systematically the efforts needed to carry out these decisions; and measuring the results of these decisions against the expectations through organized, systematic feedback. ~ Peter Drucker

Entrepreneurial business favours the open mind. It favours people whose optimism drives them to prepare for many possible futures, pretty much purely for the joy of doing so. ~ Richard Branson

These inventors were elevating the formulation of entrepreneurial ideas to the status of a visionary activity. Though forced to justify their efforts in the pragmatic language of venture capital, they were at heart utopian thinkers intent on transforming the world. ~ Alain De Botton

Obviously, New York and Boston and Los Angeles have pretty vibrant entrepreneurial scenes. ~ Jason Calacanis

Book authors are in high demand for speaking engagements and appearances; they are the new 'celebrity' and celebrities gain access. Authors not only make money from royalties or book advances but from their keynotes, presentations and strategically branded product lines. This includes entrepreneurial ideas for you to extend yourself beyond just writing and prepares you to add speaking and consulting to your revenue stream. You have to begin to look outside book sales and towards the speaking market. There are radio, interviews, news, television, small channel television keynotes, lectures, seminars and workshops. These types of events have the possibility to be much more lucrative than just selling books. In essence, the book builds and brands you in the public eye. It gives you credibility and the opportunity to be more than you are. It enables you to now be a voice, a teacher, a leader, an expert - after all, you wrote the book on it! ~ Kytka Hilmar-Jezek

Don't try to be original; just try to be good. ~ Paul Rand

The best way we can encourage people to create companies that create jobs is to celebrate the diverse entrepreneurial stories and the variety of drivers that led these entrepreneurs to sticking their necks out. ~ Chip Conley

A touch of the jitters sharpens the mind, gets the adrenaline flowing and helps you to focus. ~ Richard Branson

I have a difference with Senator [Bernie] Sanders, who promises free college, which, if you look at the fine print, depends really on governors coming up with a lot of the money, which I don't think is a particularly wise bet. And I have a plan to help people pay down their student debt, because I want to unleash the entrepreneurial energy that young people have. ~ Hillary Clinton

Fair Trade is a market-based, entrepreneurial response to business as usual: it helps third-word farmers developing direct market access as well as the organizational and management capacity to add value to their products and take them directly to the global market. Direct trade, a fair price, access to capital and local capacity-building, which are the core strategies of this model, have been successfully building farmers' incomes and self-reliance for more than 50 years. ~ Paul Rice

The Shakespearean theatre was the product of the entrepreneurial maritime culture of the age, ~ Boris Johnson

I was pretty entrepreneurial as a kid. I had a lemonade stand. When I was 12, I arbitraged the price of 7-Eleven hot dogs; I'd buy the ones that are pre-wrapped with the bun and then sell them on the beach. ~ Stewart Butterfield

We know that pumping oil out of the ground does not create many jobs. It does not foster an entrepreneurial spirit, nor does it sharpen critical faculties. ~ Ali Al-Naimi

Being both entrepreneurial and social is no longer an oxymoron, but rather a tautology. ~ Jeremy Rifkin

The general message would be to say to all these young people: If you have entrepreneurial aspirations, there is money, there are consumers, there is a huge market. The only thing you need to do is to go there and start doing things. ~ Maelle Gavet

I want completing the single market to be our driving mission. I want us to be at the forefront of transformative trade deals with the US, Japan and India as part of the drive towards global free trade. And I want us to be pushing to exempt Europe's smallest entrepreneurial companies from more EU directives. ~ David Cameron

In social policy, when we provide a safety net, it should be designed to help people take more entrepreneurial risks, not to turn them into dependents. This doesn't mean that we should be callous to the underprivileged. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The entrepreneurial mind-set is that risk is the heightened probability that there is a big range of possible outcomes. ~ Heidi Roizen

When I was young, every time I criticized someone, my mother would stand me in front of the mirror and say: 'The flaws you see in others are actually a reflection of yourself.' That taught me to pay close attention when I looked at others. ~ Richard Branson

In taking Dell private, we plan to go back to our roots, focusing on the entrepreneurial spirit that made Dell one of the fastest-growing and most successful companies in history. ~ Michael Dell

If we didn't have the Albanian entrepreneurial spirit and financial support from the diaspora, this stupid political class would have destroyed the country by now. ~ Fatos Nano

Even if you're not yet an entrepreneur, you can be entrepreneurial in everything you do. If you view each stop as an opportunity to learn something, there is always something you will take away from that experience. ~ Tory Burch

When we love something, emotion often drives our actions.
This is the gift and the challenge entrepreneurs face every day. The companies we dream of and build from scratch are part of us and intensely personal. They are our families. Our lives.
But the entrepreneurial journey is not for everyone. Yes, the highs are high and the rewards can be thrilling. But the lows can break your heart. Entrepreneurs must love what they do to such a degree that doing it is worth sacrifice and, at times, pain. But doing anything else, we think, would be unimaginable ~ Howard Schultz

A business person is all about solving problems. ~ Ehab Atalla

There are two things that make today the greatest entrepreneurial age: 1. We have access to teachers like never before. 2. You can start a business from home while still working at your job. ~ Robert T. Kiyosaki

Leaders are problem solvers by talent and temperament, and by choice. For them, the new information environment-undermining old means of control, opening up old closets of secrecy, reducing the relevance of ownership, early arrival, and location-should seem less a litany of problems than an agenda for action. Reaching for a way to describe the entrepreneurial energy of his fabled editor Harold Ross, James Thurber said 'He was always leaning forward, pushing something invisible ahead of him.' That's the appropriate posture for a knowledge executive. ~ Harlan Cleveland

Entrepreneurial business favors the open mind. ~ Richard Branson

My half-baked reading of history is that we continue to go through these waves of entrepreneurial explosion followed by merger mania and consolidation. Out of that come big sluggish companies that eventually collapse under the weight of what they've created, and are killed off by the next wave of entrepreneurs. ~ Tom Peters

Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade. ~ David Harvey

There are a number of traits that combine to create entrepreneurial potential. We find that openness coordinates very well with successful entrepreneurs. The more open-minded you are, the more you see the world as it actually is. The more closed-minded, the more you see the world as you want it to be. ~ Adeo Ressi

By the spring of 1963, Las Vegas was made up of an odd convergence of gamblers, gangsters, and government. All three forces, intentionally or unintentionally, catered to every kind of human weakness. Although the aboveground nuclear blasts were gone, the town was still full of glitzy, beckoning casinos; flamboyant, roguish celebrities; down-and-out and entrepreneurial prostitutes; and notorious, brutal criminals. By now it had gained its much deserved reputation as "Sin City" - universally considered a town where "just about anything goes." And surrounding it were the infamous "holes in the desert." Many of Las Vegas's problems were known to be buried in those same holes.
So, naturally, as a woman who relished audacity, this would be the place to which my mother would move my sister and me. As it turned out, that was the other part of her telephone call's "exciting news. ~ Gary Spetz

Remember, mindset is the #1 most important thing as you start your entrepreneurial journey, and it will continue to guide you the entire way. ~ Kate Erickson

Entrepreneurial knowledge has little to do with certified expertise, advanced degrees, or the learning of establishment schools. The fashionably educated and cultivated spurn the kind of fanatically focused learning commanded by the innovators. Wealth all too often comes from doing what other people consider insufferably boring or unendurably hard. ~ George Gilder

Educationists should build the capacities of the spirit of inquiry, creativity, entrepreneurial and moral leadership among students and become their role model. ~ A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

The research that Noam Wasserman has assembled here can help entrepreneurial companies who want to prepare well for their future. The Founder's Dilemmas is a must-read for anyone thinking about starting a business. ~ Timothy C. Draper

We seem to forget that everything that is good for the environment is a job. Solar panels don't put themselves up. Wind turbines don't manufacture themselves. Houses don't retrofit themselves and put in their own new boilers and furnaces and better-fitting windows and doors. Advanced biofuel crops don't plant themselves. Community gardens don't tend themselves. Farmers' markets don't run themselves. Every single thing that is good for the environment is actually a job, a contract, or an entrepreneurial opportunity. ~ Van Jones

For a franchise system to work well, you really need people with an entrepreneurial mind-set because, while you have a large, overarching system that everybody has to work with, a lot of local issues have to be handled. ~ Fred DeLuca

If you want to get into a good entrepreneurial business, guillotines may be in fashion. ~ Gerald Celente

I've had an entrepreneurial mindset from a young age and I've been interested in companies and products that are a little bit different. ~ Andy Murray

The desire to do different things was the main motivator that made me leave late night because I'd been there seven years. The combination of an entrepreneurial desire to see how far I could push my success and a short attention span. But now I've done other things. And I'm sort of ready to sit somewhere and sit in the same place for a while. ~ Andy Richter

The key to finding financial freedom is to unlock your entrepreneurial intelligence, work your network and lead the time. ~ Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

Lagos is a metropolis of almost twenty million people, with more energy than London, more entrepreneurial spirit than New York, and so people come up with all sorts of ways to make a living. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Be brave enough to try something new; you might just succeed. ~ Stacey Kehoe

Everyone on our team shares a couple passions - putting the fun back in snacking, an entrepreneurial spiriting, and the passion for creating an innovative and exciting brand - all of which makes popchips a really fun place to work these days. ~ Keith Belling

President Obama's over in Indonesia when guys like me were at a paper route. President Obama, I don't know what experience he had at that same age when he was in Indonesia. So I think it's hard for him to grasp that America entrepreneurial spirit. ~ Foster Friess

Entrepreneurial management in the new venture has four requirements: It requires, first, a focus on the market. It requires, second, financial foresight, and especially planning for cash flow and capital needs ahead. It requires, third, building a top management team long before the new venture actually needs one and long before it can actually afford one. And finally, it requires of the founding entrepreneur a decision in respect to his or her own role, area of work, and relationships. ~ Peter F. Drucker

Productivity -- real, self-driven productivity -- was one of the first entrepreneurial skills I learned. It served me well when I was on my own, and it has served me even better as an employee because it requires a kind of organization and self-motivation that employees aren't necessarily incentivized to cultivate. After all, if you are superproductive, all you'll get is more work to do, right? ~ Nacie Carson

An entrepreneurial mind is always looking for new opportunities. ~ Ricardo Salinas Pliego

the income of nonwage workers is "mixed," because it combines income from labor with income from capital. This is also referred to as "entrepreneurial income. ~ Thomas Piketty

Let me say that I think the economic history of the last 150 years clearly shows that if you want to industrialize a country in a short period, let us say 20 years, and you don't have a well-developed private sector, entrepreneurial class, then central planning is important. ~ Manmohan Singh

History tells us that America does best when the private sector is energetic and entrepreneurial and the government is attentive and engaged. Who among us, really, would, looking back, wish to edit out either sphere at the entire expense of the other? ~ Jon Meacham

A real entrepreneur is somebody who has no safety net underneath them. ~ Henry Kravis

Supporting the entrepreneurial spirit is our best chance for economic progress. ~ Scott Peters

A leadership culture is one where everyone thinks like an owner, a CEO or a managing director. It's one where everyone is entrepreneurial and proactive. ~ Robin S. Sharma

The most profitable hour is the 11th hour. Keep going. ~ Richie Norton

But there's some sort of revealing lesson here in the beyond-short-term viability-curve of advances in consumer technology. The career of videophony conforms neatly to this curve's classically annular shape: First there's some sort of terrific, sci-fi-like advance in consumer tech - like from aural to video phoning - which advance always, however, has certain un- foreseen disadvantages for the consumer; and then but the market-niches created by those disadvantages - like people's stressfully vain repulsion at their own videophonic appearance - are ingeniously filled via sheer entrepreneurial verve; and yet the very advantages of these ingenious disadvantage-compensations seem all too often to undercut the original high-tech advance, resulting in consumer-recidivism and curve-closure and massive shirt-loss for precipitant investors. In the present case, the stress- and-vanity-compensations' own evolution saw video-callers rejecting first their own faces and then even their own heavily masked and enhanced physical likenesses and finally covering the video-cameras altogether and transmitting attractively stylized static Tableaux to one another's TPs. And, behind these lens-cap dioramas and transmitted Tableaux, callers of course found that they were once again stresslessly invisible, unvainly makeup- and toupeeless and baggy-eyed behind their celebrity-dioramas, once again free - since once again unseen - to doodle, blemish-scan, manicure, crease-check - while on t ~ David Foster Wallace

Even the best data security systems can't protect private taxpayer information from entrepreneurial foreign businesses than can make huge profits selling U.S. taxpayer information. ~ Melissa Bean

Engineering college students should be encouraged to start entrepreneurial ventures in their second year itself. It is safer to fail while in college. ~ Kris Gopalakrishnan

All companies can benefit from fostering a more flexible environment (creating a place where the most talented, industrious, and entrepreneurial people want to work) and relinquishing hierarchical control to favor a results-oriented meritocracy. ~ Maynard Webb

An entrepreneurial spirit makes you someone who organizes, manages, and assumes the risks of a business enterprise, talent or calling to become an agent of change. ~ Archibald Marwizi

Where one sees a dead end, another sees a freeway without a speed limit. That's what separates the entrepreneur or small business owner from the rest of the world. ~ Sarah Gerdes

Every single part of our entrepreneurial journey will begin as an idea that will only become reality when we show up and bring it into the world. ~ Carrie Green

The growth of entrepreneurial classes throughout the world is an asset in the promotion of human rights and individual liberty, and it should be understood and used as such. Yet peace is the first and most important condition for continued prosperity and freedom. America's military power must be secure because the United States is the only guarantor of global peace and stability. The current neglect of America's armed forces threatens its ability to maintain peace. ~ Condoleezza Rice

Entrepreneurs typically start on a path they do not see as risky at all, then something happens that upsets their expectations and, being too far into their projects to turn back, they are forced to improvise. Those who get over this hump, or mountain, of unexpected trouble are the surviving entrepreneurial successes. ~ Robert E. Litan

Entrepreneurship is the cornerstone to African development and the key to local value creation in Africa. I am determined to ensure that Africa's next generation of entrepreneurs have the platform they need to turn their entrepreneurial aspirations into sustainable businesses that will drive economic growth and job creation across Africa, ~ Tony Elumelu

Most entrepreneurial types are free-wheelers who like to do a variety of things and do not enjoy routine tasks. But a smart entrepreneur will eventually learn that while ideas start businesses, organization makes them successful. ~ Larry Burkett

I was 40-something years old. I hadn't shown any entrepreneurial spunk up until that point. ~ Alex Blumberg

(this was a couple years before the sudden advance of someone in the luggage industry realizing that suitcases could be fitted with little wheels and telescoping handles so they could be pulled, which was just the sort of abrupt ingenious advance that makes entrepreneurial capitalism such an exciting system - it gives people incentive to make things more efficient). ~ David Foster Wallace

I have always been business minded, always been sorta an entrepreneurial guy; I played a character on 'Felicity' that was modeled after me, actually. ~ Greg Grunberg

Be first, different & daring ~ James D. Roumeliotis

Innovative, bottom-up methods will solve problems that now seem intractable - from energy to poverty to disease. Science and technology, powered by the fuel of entrepreneurial energy, are the largest multipliers of resources we have to solve our many social problems. ~ Vinod Khosla

There's nobody in the world that wouldn't change places with the Americans. The economy is phenomenally large, the entrepreneurial class is very alive and very well, the universities, despite budget problems, still turn out something like 90 percent of the refereed academic and technical articles in the world. There's a lot on everybody's agenda. ~ Tom Peters

It's not about having a Silicon Valley attitude - it's about having an entrepreneurial attitude. It's about partnering with other organizations in and around your area. It's about thinking big with entrepreneurs that sit next to you in your coworking space. It's about collaborating with tech gurus, social media wizards and community leaders at cool business events. It's the people that make a community an entrepreneurial one - not the location - and it's up to you to contribute. ~ Brad Feld

You can do more than you think ~ Chris Guillebeau