First Company Quotes

#1. I was broke for more than 10 years. I remember staying up all night one night at my first company and looking in couch cushions the next morning for some change to buy coffee.

Evan Williams

#2. The first company to produce a certified two seat electric aircraft with a 1.5 hour range will dominate the aviation training market.

Erik Lindbergh

#3. I started my first company when I was in my college dorm as a senior with two of my really good friends. We started a company that became SparkNotes. You know CliffsNotes? SparkNotes is a modern-day version of that.

Sam Yagan

#4. It's the first company to build the mental position that has the upper hand, not the first company to make the product. IBM didn't invent the computer; Sperry Rand did. But IBM was the first to build the computer position in the prospect's mind.

Al Ries

#5. My first company, Pure Software, was exciting and innovative in the first few years and bureaucratic and painful in the last few before it got acquired. The problem was we tried to systemize everything and set up perfect procedures.

Reed Hastings

#6. I usually tell people that everything I learned about being an entrepreneur I learned by f'ing up at my first company.

Mark Suster

#7. When I started my first company, I still had a 40-hour a week job. I was working on my company on nights and weekends before I took the plunge and gave up a salary.

Kathryn Minshew

#8. Juicero is the first company to make cold-pressed juice something that people can make themselves at home. The challenges to design and engineer a press that can deliver 8,000 pounds of force are tremendous.

Yves Behar

#9. In my first company, Seer Technologies, where I was chief technology officer, we shied away from the media. We watched every word and were guarded in front of journalists.

Vivek Wadhwa

#10. As good and as smart as you may be, no one knows everything. I truly wish I was as smart as I thought I was when I started my first company.

Jay Samit

#11. In high school, I started my first company, called M Cubed Software. We named it that because it was me and two other guys named Mike.

Mike McCue

#12. My first company produced 'Silicon Alley Reporter' magazine, where I held the dual titles of CEO and Editor.

Jason Calacanis

#13. A company invites their employees to sign up for a plan where every time they get a raise, some part of that raise goes to increasing their contribution rate to the 401k plan. In the first company we convinced to adopt this plan, saving rates tripled.

Richard Thaler

#14. When I sold my first company at 30, I could have done whatever I wanted to do.

Shai Agassi

#15. It became the first company in the history of the world to offer cryogenics as part of its employee benefits package.

George Packer

#16. I was bullied very badly in high school. I was a very successful kid. I sold my first company at a young age. There was a lot of misplaced rage in high school towards me. My brothers and sisters identified it as bullying, but I didn't at the time.

Charlie Ebersol

#17. There are tons of great names who have gotten fourth at their first Olympics, and they just kept with it for the next quad. I'm among good company.

Gracie Gold

#18. The worst thing that happened to air travel in the past ten years was the bankruptcy of Xhibit Corp., the parent company of SkyMall. I recalled with clarity the first time I boarded a flight and it was missing from all usual nooks and crannies. It had been a dark day.

L. H. Cosway

#19. Go where your customers take you! For example, did you know that Sony's first product was a rice cooker? Since abandoning the rice cooker, it has merely managed to become the world's biggest consumer electronics company.

Naveen Jain

#20. The Supreme Court told me that I should have filed a complaint within six months of the company's first decision to pay me less even though I didn't know about it for nearly two decades.

Lilly Ledbetter

#21. I took a job at the Walt Disney Company and after 18 months decided to go to business school at Harvard. I was awestruck by the campus. My first reaction was 'I don't belong here.' Then I said, 'I'm here; let's get on with it.'

Jason Kilar

#22. it is not an exaggeration to state that any company designed for success in the twentieth century is doomed to failure in the twenty-first.

David S. Rose

#23. Customers will never love a company until the employees love it first.

Simon Sinek

#24. As a first time director it's interesting, but not all that different from what I did before. A lot of parts of this job seem to be very similar to running a big company.

Timothy Miller

#25. If your company matches your 401(k) contribution, then no matter what, contribute to your 401(k) first. You put in a dollar, they put in 50 cents. It's an automatic 50 percent return on your money. You can't pass that up. I'd rather have the 50 percent than pay 32 percent interest on a credit card.

Suze Orman

#26. Being a woman in control of a company - even a small private company, as ours was then - was so singular and surprising in those days that I necessarily stood out. In 1963, and for the first several years of my working life, my situation was certainly unique.

Katharine Graham

#27. When the person who personifies the WHY departs without clearly articulating WHY the company was founded in the first place, they leave no clear cause for their successor to lead.

Simon Sinek

#28. My first job was working at Benihana as kitchen help. In college, I was a telemarketer for a company at the same time I was a bike messenger for this greasy fast-food place.

Steve Aoki

#29. Every adviser told me to study the company, learn the business for the first 90 days and don't make any decisions. I couldn't resist seeing broken things and immediately taking action.

Marcelo Claure

#30. My first job was for a blue jean company as a sitting model. I posed for 15 minutes and made $50. It was 1976.

Janice Dickinson

#31. Google the phrase "the most hated man in America." And this guy is one of the first people to pop up. Martin Shkreli, aka Pharma Bro, a 32-year-old drug company entrepreneur and former hedge fund manager who has a lot of money and loves to talk about how he spends it.

Joy-Ann Reid

#32. If you compromise in the first five, ten hires it might kill the company.

Sam Altman

#33. My first instinct was to make an excuse or to get bashful or to change the subject...but then I realized I was in good company. I could be honest, and this guy was the one who seemed to be holding back. "Actually, yeah, that was kind of amazing.

Tyler Oakley

#34. Why is she convinced Ambrose is out to get her" Leif asked
"Ambrose?" Yelena raised a slender eyebrow. She carried a tray of tea and fruit. "You're on a first name basis with the Commander now?"
"I usually call him Amby, but not in mixed company.

Maria V. Snyder

#35. I was five when I did my first show with the Mountain Play Theatre company in Marin County. I started young, and since no one in my family was involved in the industry in any way shape or form, I think everyone thought I'd do a few plays and that would be it. But then I kept doing it.

Claire Coffee

#36. Obviously we had to study Shakespeare at school, but to be honest, I was not a fan. I found the language very difficult, and I didn't enjoy watching it or studying it. I auditioned five times for the Royal Shakespeare Company early on in my career, and I didn't even get past the first rounds.

Samuel Barnett

#37. Being the first to do something like this also registers a lot of attention that the line might not have gotten if all four books had just appeared from one company.

Mark Millar

#38. I had worked in this New York theatre company for my first eight or nine years out of college, acting and directing there, and I'd begun to write a little bit.

Clark Gregg

#39. What any manager will try to bring to a company first and foremost is an energy and commitment to the business. To try and really roll your sleeves up.

James Murdoch

#40. One thing we never did with 'Bad Company' was talk down to our reader. And we certainly don't do that with the new story, 'Bad Company, First Casualties.'

Peter Milligan

#41. The best way to preserve your privacy is to use a search engine that does not keep your logs in the first place. That's the approach used by Startpage and its European parent company, Ixquick.

Barton Gellman

#42. In management, the first concern of the company is the happiness of people who are connected with it. If the people do not feel happy and cannot be made happy, that company does not deserve to exist.

Kaoru Ishikawa

#43. The world of finance is a mysterious world in which, incredible as the fact may appear, evaporation precedes liquidation. First the capital evaporates, and then the company goes into liquidation. These are very unnatural physics ...

Joseph Conrad

#44. The competitive advantage of the twenty-first century is increasingly derived from hard-to-copy intangible assets such as company culture and leadership effectiveness.

Scott Keller

#45. We have a constantly-changing portfolio of social media experiments. The first time we tried applying social technologies in a customer service department it became the most productive department in the company.

Sandy Carter

#46. New truth: The first cause cannot always be the company. It must also be manager's deep fulfillment within the company.

Stan Slap

#47. From my point of view, what I really like, what I think is really terrific about my work, is that the company's had the opportunity to train literally thousands and thousands of brand new franchisees to successfully run their very first business.

Fred DeLuca

#48. My teachers encouraged me to audition for some professional work during our summer vacation. I landed my first job. It was for the National Theatre Company's Mimika Pantomime troupe. I ended up touring with them for the next two years.

Didi Conn

#49. The company of fools may first make us smile, but in the end we always feel melancholy.

Oliver Goldsmith

#50. I am a gambler. I decided to go in with Company E in the first wave.

Robert Capa

#51. A pig's trotter is a fantastic thing. The first night of my honeymoon in Paris, my wife fell asleep in her steak tartare, so my trotter kept me company.

Fergus Henderson

#52. At Revolution Health Group we will put consumers back at the center of the system by giving them more choice, control and convenience.. while building the first comprehensive, consumer-driven health care company.

Steve Case

#53. Basically, I left Northern Telecom after 7.5 years of being in one company after school. And then, I ended up in a series of start-ups. The first of those was a company called Sitech, and they were in local area networks.

Ram Shriram

#54. I grew up in a working class family where there was no health insurance. I saw first hand the fracturing of the American dream and the bitterness that comes when there is no hope and a lot of despair. So I wanted to build the company, in a sense, that my father never got a chance to work for.

Howard Schultz

#55. As one of the first employees at a small cellular phone start-up called Nextel, I gained firsthand experience in how a business grows from an idea to a company that, at its peak, employed many thousands.

Jack Markell

#56. I eventually want to be the anchor of the first trillion-dollar company.

Kanye West

#57. The first thing I ever invested in was Twitter. Blaine Cook, former CTO, was leaving the company and asked me if I wanted to buy his stock.

Gary Vaynerchuk

#58. You want to think about what is the path for my first 10 or 15 employees going to be as the company grows.

Sam Altman

#59. Not everybody is created equal, and it's important for companies to identify those high potentials and treat them differently, accelerate their development and pay them more. That process is so incredibly important to developing first-class leadership in a company.

Anne M. Mulcahy

#60. And this was the end of my first friendship with one of that innumerable company of people who are foreigners in their own country, but who are in reality its finest sons ...

Maxim Gorky

#61. I guess my first professional experience was when my church choir director told my mother that I had a gift with my voice and said that I should think about auditioning, at 11 years old, for the chorus of our regional opera company.

Sondra Radvanovsky

#62. It is totally unconscionable to subject defenseless animals to mutilation and death, just so a company can be the first to market a new shade of nail polish or a new, improved laundry detergent. It's cruel, it's brutal, it's inhumane, and most people don't want it.

Abigail Van Buren

#63. I think as a rough estimate, you should aim to give about 10% of the company to the first 10 employees.

Sam Altman

#64. We kind of missed the boat on that," he recalled. " So we needed to catch up real fast." The mark of an innovative company is not only that it comes up with new ideas first, but also that it knows how to leapfrog when it find itself behind.

Walter Isaacson

#65. The script for 'In Good Company' was the first one I ever showed my dad.

Topher Grace

#66. Despite his recent pang of desire for human company of any kind, the very first word addressed to him in reality instantly elicited his usual, unpleasant and irritable feeling of disgust towards any stranger who came into contact with him, or showed the slightest wish to do so. 'I

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#67. I learned my first lesson at the Walt Disney Company about not being able to trust my associates.

Michael Ovitz

#68. It is first and foremost very hard work! But I have a wonderful part and I do have fun. The company, cast and crew of 'Passions' are wonderful to work with.

Juliet Mills

#69. I left acting for a couple of years to found my company, Wayfarer, and the first project I did was this documentary series I created called 'My Last Days' to remind us that our time is limited and to inspire us to do more and to be the best selves that we can be.

Justin Baldoni

#70. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology, so he built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering.

Walter Isaacson

#71. As a long-time British Airways advisor, I have seen first-hand that as a company they are committed to innovation, entrepreneurship and the Bay Area community. UnGrounded is strong proof of that commitment.

Rhonda Abrams

#72. 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.

Mark Zuckerberg

#73. For the first time he began to wonder whether he should jettison his transatlantic dream and settle for something more quotidian, perhaps focus his company on ship-to-shore communication. There was

Erik Larson

#74. Philologically, the word Kodak is as meaningless as a child's first goo. Terse, abrupt to the point of rudeness, literally bitten off by firm and unyielding consonants at both ends, it snaps like a camera shutter in your face. What more would one ask. (Explaining why he named his company Kodak.)

George Eastman

#75. The story of my very first sale is the fact that I dreamed up a foolproof paper to cheat an insurance company out of several hundred thousand dollars.

Theodore Sturgeon

#76. In terms of the public positioning of the company, Satya's [Nadella] done a very good job. He sort of pivoted in a way that I don't think would have been possible for me to do even if I'd seen it that way, to really talk about this mobile-first, cloud-first world.

Steve Ballmer

#77. But we go out as a band because we enjoy each others company, first of all. And its the payoff for me, to go out and play my art and still play guitar, which is my life.

Peter Frampton

#78. See's candy company was the first high-quality business we ever bought.

Charlie Munger

#79. Offer someone the opportunity to rebuild a company or reinvent an industry as the primary incentive, and it will attract those drawn to the challenge first and the money second.

Simon Sinek

#80. When we first started the company, I didn't have any thoughts of franchising. We just had company-owned stores.

Fred DeLuca

#81. I never achieved my first goal in the National Actors Theatre, which is to have a permanent Acting Company.

Tony Randall

#82. First of all, every new company today is being built in the face of massive economic headwinds, making the challenge far greater than it was in the relatively benign '90s.

Marc Andreessen

#83. When I first got into making makeup, I didn't necessarily want to start a company. I just wanted to make a lipstick that looked like lips, only better.

Bobbi Brown

#84. The medics were the most popular, respected, and appreciated men in the company. Their weapons were first-aid kits, their place on the line was wherever a man called out that he was wounded.

Stephen E. Ambrose

#85. When I was younger and first started thinking about my future, I decided to either become a professor or start a company.

Anonymous

#86. By an irony of fate, my first employment was as a draughtsman. I hated drawing; it was for me the very worst of annoyances. Fortunately, it was not long before I secured the position I sought, that of chief electrician to the telephone company.

Nikola Tesla

#87. I have always been an advocate and was, in my last job at M&S, a supporter of the Al Gore dictum that a sustainable business can be a profitable business. We were the first sizeable company in the U.K. to prove that was the case.

Stuart Rose

#88. No one was more surprised that that first Boston record took off than the record company itself.

Tom Scholz

#89. Nadia's experiences during her first months as a single woman living on her own did, in some moments, equal or even surpass the loathsomeness and dangerousness that her family had warned her about. But she had a job at an insurance company, and she was determined to survive, and so she did.

Mohsin Hamid

#90. Look at yourself, idiot. You reek like the slaughter-house. Plan your dastard's revenge as you like. But for those of us liking our company civilized, spare us the horror and bathe yourself first!

Janny Wurts

#91. I was first in line for the iPhone, but I'm not a fanboy of any company - I'm in favor of anything that's best of breed.

Robert Scoble

#92. Great leaders build trust from their team because the leader is willing to put his/her people "first." Once the team believes that, they will put their leader, and the company, first as well.

Beth Ramsay

#93. I realized that 'performing' was what I wanted to do when I did my first professional gig as a dancer with my company 'Synergy' in Canada. I was overwhelmed with how it felt to perform in front of an audience.

Catherine Mary Stewart

#94. In my first story, 'Mr. Mysterious & Company' ... I was asked to take out some of the humor because editors were afraid reviewers would dismiss the book as a joke. Today, humor is enjoyed and no longer regarded as literary brummagem.

Sid Fleischman

#95. It wasn't until we got our first office in Palo Alto where things became more like a company. We never went into this wanting to build a company.

Mark Zuckerberg

#96. One of our first customers asked me how big we want to be. I said I want to be really big. Later, it bothered me that I answered that way. Now I say I just want to be a great company.

Kevin Plank

#97. Within the first year of launching my company, Spanx, I decided to go over to England and cold-call Harrods, Harvey Nichols, and Selfridges the same way I had cold-called Neiman Marcus, Saks, Nordstrom, and Bloomingdale's here in the United States.

Sara Blakely

#98. If you start a chocolate company, you can't compete with Cadbury in the first ten years because they are a big company.

Tamim Iqbal

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

Steve Jobs

#100. When I read about young designers selling 51 percent of their company to someone else, I cringe. I want to say, 'Don't do it - call me first.'

Tom Ford