Startup Quotes

Big companies are often in the process of laying off workers. Small startup companies are the ones that are hiring. The statistics prove that's where job growth is going to occur. ~ Jerry Moran

It was actually very difficult., especially during the first five years of the start-up stage, when all the odds seemed to be against us - this is probably true for most entrepreneurs. To succeed, you really have to put your heart and soul into it. (p. 71) ~ Injap Sia

While Indian CEOs in Non-Indian companies are getting all the praise and admiration from the Indians, startups born on Indian soil remain unrecognized - this is not a matter of pride, it's a matter of shame, especially for a population whose history is replete with mathematical, scientific and philosophical achievements. ~ Abhijit Naskar

In big companies projects have to scale and Lean Startup help us to do it ~ Beth Comstock

If a startup stays in Microsoft, it does not have a chance, because all it tries to do goes against what Microsoft is about. ~ Leroy Hood

If you can't write your idea on the back of my calling card, you don't have a clear idea. ~ David Belasco

Europe is made of history,
America of philosophy,
Asia of prosperity,
and Africa of opportunity. ~ Sami Leino

The key to most start-up successes is seeing a need and filling it. ~ Ziad K. Abdelnour

If you have a startup that's keeping it up at night because you think it's so great, then you should do that. ~ Sam Altman

We see a lot of startup companies, people that have a home-based office, they've been working out of their basement for two or three years, and now their basement or kids cannot accommodate them any longer. ~ Nancy Fox

As a small business or startup, one of the factors you should always consider when looking at a potential partnership is the incremental potential reach. Note that wider reach doesn't always mean a better partnership opportunity. Instead of sheer scale, take a look at which communities your potential partner can open up for you. ~ Leah Busque

When we're considering investing in a startup, we first want to know that the entrepreneur has a clear understanding of the market. Who are the major players? What about this market is ripe for disruption? What is this startup's unfair advantage to disrupt this market? In the first conversation we have with a company, these are questions that we're looking for clear answers to. ~ Mike Belsito

Start each day with a positive thought and a grateful heart. ~ Roy Bennett

If you have an idea that you can't get out of your head, do a startup. Otherwise join a startup. ~ Fred Wilson

The perfect target market for a startup is a small group of particular people concentrated together and served by few or no competitors. Any big market is a bad choice, and a big market already served by competing companies is even worse. This is why it's always a red flag when entrepreneurs talk about getting 1% of a $100 billion market. In practice, a large market will either lack a good starting point or it will be open to competition, so it's hard to ever reach that 1%. And even if you do succeed in gaining a small foothold, you'll have to be satisfied with keeping the lights on: cutthroat competition means your profits will be zero. ~ Peter Thiel

The Startup Act should give all Americans, not just immigrants, a better shot at being tomorrow's engineers and entrepreneurs. And that opportunity could begin at a young age with education in computer programming. ~ Marvin Ammori

In 2007, there weren't any other accelerators, at least that I was aware of. We were almost the prototypical Y Combinator founders: We were highly technical but had never done a startup before. We also didn't know anyone in the Valley - investors, other entrepreneurs, potential hires. YC seemed like a great way to bootstrap that network. ~ Patrick Collison

Don't just create art to make money. Make money so you can create more art. (Exchange any words you want for 'create art' and see if it fits). ~ Richie Norton

A hardware startup with no funding is a risky venture. ~ Brendan Iribe

The best founders are extremely thoughtful and have an eye for quality. I don't know if there's any generic advice here that would be helpful. Startup knowledge is a moving target. ~ Naval Ravikant

This book is about the questions you must ask and answer to succeed in the business of doing new things: what follows is not a manual or a record of knowledge but an exercise in thinking. Because that is what a startup has to do: question received ideas and rethink business from scratch. ~ Peter Thiel

Instead of waiting to start big, start small so that you can grow big ~ Nicky Verd

If you can't develop a lot of paying customers for your product, you don't really have a business to build. ~ Timothy Freriks

Using the Lean Startup approach, companies can create order not chaos by providing tools to test a vision continuously. ~ Eric Ries

Procrastination is like going to a fancy restaurant and filling up on bread and not leaving enough room for dinner. ~ Richie Norton

Listen to your customers, not your competitors. ~ Joel Spolsky

Startup stories are always smoother in the telling than they are in reality. A startup is not one, but a series of 'Aha!' moments, and some which seem like 'Aha!' moments but turn out not to be. ~ Anthony Goldbloom

The first thing to recognize is that no startup has time to do optional things. ~ Ben Horowitz

You have to be decisive. Indecisiveness is a startup killer. ~ Sam Altman

Startup CEOs should not play the odds. When you are building a company, you must believe there is an answer and you cannot pay attention to your odds of finding it. You just have to find it. It matters not whether your chances are nine in ten or one in a thousand; your task is the same. ~ Ben Horowitz

So always keep momentum, it's this prime directive for managing a startup. ~ Sam Altman

A single mediocre hire in the first five will often in fact kill a startup. ~ Sam Altman

It turns out that no undergrad class prepares you to start a startup - you learn most of it as you do it. ~ Kevin Systrom

YouTube began as a failed video-dating site. Twitter was a failed music service. In each case, the founders continued to try new concepts when their big ideas failed. They often worked around the clock to try to overcome their failure before all their capital was spent. Speed to fail gives a startup more runway to pivot and ultimately succeed. ~ Jay Samit

Because startups often accidentally build something nobody wants, it doesn't matter much if they do it on time and on budget. The goal of a startup is to figure out the right thing to build - the thing customers want and will pay for - as quickly as possible. ~ Eric Ries

If you want to build a startup that has a good chance of succeeding, don't listen to me. Listen to Paul Graham and others who are applying tons of data to the idea of startup success. That will maximize your chance of being successful. ~ Michael Arrington

Make a start, even if you have a controversial idea! ~ Abhishek Ratna

One of the top causes of startup death - right after cofounder problems - is building something no one wants. ~ Kathryn Minshew

Let's say a startup is hot. It ships something great, and it achieves success. Thus, it's able to attract the best, brightest, and most talented. These people have been told they're the best since childhood. Indeed, being hired by the hot company is "proof" that they are the A and A+ players; in fact, the company is so hot that it can out-recruit Google and Microsoft. ~ Guy Kawasaki

Our promise was to deliver value before profit, ... ~ Biz Stone

Define your own success: If you're going after a million bucks with your own startup, you've already failed yourself. Instead, do something because it's interesting, challenging, it offers you the chance to learn something new or gives you the chance to work with really interesting people. Most startups that are designed to make money, especially in this environment, don't. ~ Tara Hunt

Entrepreneurs don't ask for permission. They act per a mission. ~ Ryan Lilly

Where there's a WALL, there's a WAY. ~ Richie Norton

You're better off being The Beatles than The Monkees, as a startup ... ~ Ben Horowitz

We should not prioritize on the basis of project profitability, but rather on how this profitability is affected by delay. ~ Donald G. Reinertsen

Every startup CEO should understand Gamification, because gaming is the new normal. ~ Bing Gordon

My first job after college was at Magic Quest, an educational software startup company where I was responsible for writing the content. I found that job somewhat accidentally but after working there a few weeks and loving my job, I decided to pursue a career in technology. ~ Susan Wojcicki

Every startup is small at the start. Every monopoly dominates a large share of its market. Therefore, every startup should start with a very small market. Always err on the side of starting too small. ~ Peter Thiel

You simply can't be tentative in a startup. You have to go for it at every chance you get. And if the leader of the organization is anxious, his or her fear pervades the organization. Everything comes from the top in a company. So if you are starting a company or building one, face your fears and move past them. It's critically important to your company. ~ Fred Wilson

The life of a startup is full of ups and downs, an emotional roller coaster ride that you can't quite imagine if you've spent your whole career in a corporation. ~ Harvey MacKay

The way forward is to learn to see every startup in any industry as a grand experiment. ~ Eric Ries

I basically apply with my teams the lean startup principles I used in the private sector - go into Silicon Valley mode, work at startup speed, and attack, doing things in short amounts of time with extremely limited resources. ~ Todd Park

Recruiting talent is no different than any other challenge a startup faces. It's all about selling. ~ Vivek Wadhwa

Startups and small businesses that do not invest at least 10% of their profits into R&D will have the privilege of remaining a startup and/or a small business. ~ Mark Anthony Peterson

App idea: in real time track trends as swarms of keywords form, and use this data to invest in the next unicorn #startup.

You'll be able to ride that #startup unicorn like you are Billy the Kid, as you watch your profits shoot up. ~ Jarod Kintz

Science and vision are not opposites or even at odds. They need each other. I sometimes hear other startup folks say something along the lines of: 'If entrepreneurship was a science, then anyone could do it.' I'd like to point out that even science is a science, and still very few people can do it, let alone do it well. ~ Eric Ries

You NEED to learn how to fly before you learn how to land and you MUST learn how to land before you start flying. ~ Samer Chidiac

You can have a startup and one other thing, you can have a family, but you probably can't have many other hobbies. ~ Sam Altman

Stalking is an underrated startup strategy. ~ Linda Rottenberg

Entrepreneur, design thinking is the ability to create, portray and deliver tomorrow's distinction, today. ~ ~ Onyi Anyado

It is best to be the CEO; it is satisfactory to be an early employee, maybe the fifth or sixth or perhaps the tenth. Alternately, one may become an engineer devising precious algorithms in the cloisters of Google and its like. Otherwise, one becomes a mere employee. A coder of websites at Facebook is no one in particular. A manager at Microsoft is no one. A person (think woman) working in customer relations is a particular type of no one, banished to the bottom, as always, for having spoken directly to a non-technical human being. All these and others are ways for strivers to fall by the wayside - as the startup culture sees it - while their betters race ahead of them. Those left behind may see themselves as ordinary, even failures. ~ Ellen Ullman

If you wanted to build an Internet startup in 2005, you had to buy your own servers and hire someone to manage it. Now, that's unheard of. ~ Sam Altman

As an entrepreneur, the pressures of a startup can be enormous, but it's rarely life or death. ~ Ryan Holmes

Growth and momentum are what a startup lives on and you always have to focus on maintaining these. ~ Sam Altman

Help each user personally. Sure that won't scale to a very large size, but when a startup is just starting out, it really helps you have an advantage as a small and nimble company. ~ John Collison

Maturity is when you stop complaining and making excuses and start making changes. ~ Roy Bennett

Visionaries are especially afraid of a false negative: that customers will reject a flawed MVP that is too small or too limited.
[…]
The solution to this dilemma is a commitment to iteration. You have to commit to a locked-in agreement - ahead of time - that no matter what comes of testing the MVP, you will not give up hope. Successful entrepreneurs do not give up at the first sign of trouble, nor do they persevere the plan right into the ground. Instead, they process a unique combination of perseverance and flexibility. ~ Eric Ries

Thinking about joining a startup? Ask for a hiring bonus equal to the exercise cost, early exercise rights, and NSOs instead of ISOs. Exercise as soon as possible and ASAP file an 83(b) Election. Recently hired? If you can afford to fully exercise your options and are permitted to do so, ask to get your ISOs converted to NSOs, perform an early exercise, and file an 83(b) Election. ~ David Weekly

Every entrepreneur faces trade-offs when founding and growing their company. As we discovered at YouTube, those early decisions have far-reaching impacts and lead to unforeseen pitfalls down the road. Noam Wasserman uses vivid anecdotes and deep research to expertly outline the key early choices that define a startup, making The Founder's Dilemmas an invaluable alternative to real-world trial and error. ~ Chad Hurley

Landing a million-dollar investment for your startup is exhilarating. But as big as that number sounds, it doesn't go far. Many startups just getting off the ground won't have a CFO to monitor finances. It doesn't take much for spending to spiral out of control. ~ Ryan Holmes

The first follower is what transforms the lone nut into a leader, and in a startup, that first follower is usually a cofounder. ~ Guy Kawasaki

We are not creators; only combiners of the created. Invention isn't about new ingredients, but new recipes. And innovations taste the best. ~ Ryan Lilly

The buzz about Google these days is that it's like America itself: still the biggest game in town, but inevitably and irrevocably on the decline. Both are superpowers with unmatched resources, but both are faced with fast-growing rivals, and both will eventually be eclipsed. For America, that rival is China. For Google, it's Facebook. (This is all from tech-gossip blogs, so take it with a grain of salt. They also say a startup called MonkeyMoney is going to be huge next year.) But here's the difference: staring down the inevitable, America pays defense contractors to build aircraft carriers. Google pays brilliant programmers to do whatever they want. ~ Robin Sloan

I hate it when people call themselves 'entrepreneurs' when what they're really trying to do is launch a startup and then sell of go public, so they can cash in and move on. They're unwilling to do the work it takes to build a real company, which is the hardest work in business. ~ Steve Jobs

It's very important as a startup to get early press because, although it may not be a large number of people, having a 'Fast Company' story - some of those people that read it are going to be your next employees and hires, your next investors. ~ Jason Calacanis

The more detailed we made our plans, the longer our cycle times became ~ Donald G. Reinertsen

We paired this announcement of the R&D [commitment] with the so-called Breakthrough Energy Coalition, which is 27 [major investors] saying, "Hey, we'll put significant money into [energy innovations] when they're ready to spin out probably into startup companies." ~ Bill Gates

You need to become intimately acquainted with the value of adding value.⁣ ~ Richie Norton

The Lean Startup works only if we are able to build an organization as adaptable and fast as the challenges it faces. This ~ Eric Ries

Building a startup community is not a zero-sum game in which there are winners and losers: if everyone engages, they and the entire community can all be winners. ~ Brad Feld

More important than starting any startup, is getting to know a lot of potential co-founders. ~ Sam Altman

When you're in a startup, the first ten people will determine whether the company succeeds or not. ~ Steve Jobs

For a startup, you need to stay small so the others don't attack, or you aim to be one of the big guys. If you don't do it right, you might lose everything. ~ Hamdi Ulukaya

The majority are satisfied living within the idea of the reality instead of the reality of the idea. ~ Richie Norton

Valuations are actually quite simple to grasp. A company is only worth what two acquirers are willing to pay for it. Don't you just need to find that one buyer? If there is only one potential company interested in buying your startup, chances are you won't be hearing the word 'billion' in the offer. ~ Jay Samit

The right algorithm is to put off seeking funds for as long as physically possible. And in an ideal world, a startup would never have to seek funds at all. ~ Guy Kawasaki

When it comes to starting startups, in many ways, it's easier to start a hard startup than an easy startup. ~ Sam Altman

And The San Francisco Chronicle launched "an off-site startup-style incubator. " As Audrey Cooper, the managing editor, explained, "We hope to eventually get to the point where instead of being a newspaper company that produces websites, we think of ourselves as a digital company that also produces a newspaper. Unless you flip that switch, I don't think any newspaper will be truly successful at negotiating the digital switchover. ~ Anonymous

When I came to the United States in 2004 to attend university at Stanford, I was instantly inspired by the stories and advice from startup leaders in Silicon Valley and beyond, who had endeavoured to create new opportunities and improve lives around the world. ~ Mike Krieger

America is an unsolvable problem: a nation divided and deeply in hate with itself. If it was a startup, we'd understand how unfixable the situation is; most of us would leave for a fresh start, and the company would fall apart. America is MySpace. ~ Michael Arrington

Part of the special challenge of being a startup is the near impossibility of having your idea, company, or product be noticed by anyone, let alone a competitor. ~ Eric Ries

Early in a startup, product decisions should be hunch driven. Later on, product decisions should be data driven. ~ Fred Wilson

If someone is choosing between joining McKinsey or your startup it's very unlikely they're going to work out at the startup. ~ Sam Altman

Growing a company is a marathon that requires patience, dedication, knowledge, good decision-making, vision, and the ability to see the big picture. ~ Ziad K. Abdelnour

You have to be smart .

The Easy day are over. ~ Versatile Institute

Consumers love novelty; businesses just call it risk ~ Ben Yoskovitz

At least half the job of CEO is communication - because of human nature. People fear what they don't know. If the board wasn't hearing that things were going well, they assumed that things must be going badly. ~ Biz Stone

Startups don't just die, they commit suicide ~ Takudzwa Razemba

Coming from Ireland, it's quite hard to do a startup because you're culturally so far away from what everyone else is doing. In the Bay Area, it's much easier. It's the equivalent of an actor or actress moving to Hollywood. ~ John Collison

Because fundraising is so distracting, a startup should either be in fundraising mode or not. And when you do decide to raise money, you should focus your whole attention on it so you can get it done quickly and get back to work. ~ Anonymous