Top 100 Quotes About A Startup
#1. You're better off being The Beatles than The Monkees, as a startup ...
Ben Horowitz
#2. When you're doing a startup, life is not all roses and rainbows, like you see on Instagram, and killing it.
Paige Craig
#3. Like having a child, running a startup is the sort of experience that's hard to imagine unless you've done it yourself.
Paul Graham
#4. You have to be decisive. Indecisiveness is a startup killer.
Sam Altman
#5. We hear again and again from founders, that they wish they had waited to start a startup until they came up with an idea they really loved.
Sam Altman
#6. I operate my life like a startup. I learn a little bit and I test something else out and I keep iterating and iterating until it's perfect.
Rameet Chawla
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. I could go and buy one of the islands in the
Bahamas and turn it into my personal fiefdom, but I am much more interested in trying to build and
create a new company.
Elon Musk
#10. It turns out that no undergrad class prepares you to start a startup - you learn most of it as you do it.
Kevin Systrom
#11. More important than starting any startup, is getting to know a lot of potential co-founders.
Sam Altman
#12. Volatility and length, that's the value on an option. 10 years on a startup stock, that's a big valuable thing.
Ben Horowitz
#13. A startup will always prefer to work with an IP attorney, who believes in their idea, not one, who is only bothered about billing.
Kalyan C. Kankanala
#14. I started Shutterstock without any outside funding; I believe in creating a lean startup. By not taking outside investors early, I was forced to use every dollar I had as efficiently as possible. And I was able to keep a large part of the company.
Jon Oringer
#15. HubSpot has used the lean startup method to build a spectacularly successful company. What I particularly love about HubSpot is that they are so geeked out on data analysis and making evidence-based decisions, which are at the heart of the Lean Startup process.
Eric Ries
#16. The really dramatic growth happens when a startup only has three of four people, so only three or four people see that, whereas tens of thousands see business as it's practiced by Boeing or Philip Morris.
Jessica Livingston
#17. When you are a startup you need to hire very fast, and sometimes you have to restructure very fast.
Maurice Levy
#18. Everyone is on Facebook. It is very rare that I can't find a startup. Out of the 72 Y Combinator startups, almost all of them were on Facebook.
Robert Scoble
#19. In a big company, you can do what all the other big companies are doing. But a startup can't do what all the other startups do.
Paul Graham
#20. It's a very valuable skill to succeed in life whether you work for a startup or a Fortune 500 company.
Guy Kawasaki
#21. Thiel's law": a startup messed up at its foundation cannot be fixed.
Peter Thiel
#22. Maybe some percentage that's substantially larger than 95 percent of VCs add zero value. I would bet that 70-80 percent add negative value to a startup in their advising.
Vinod Khosla
#23. A startup can focus on only one metric. So you have to decide what that is and ignore everything else.
Noah Kagan
#24. 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
#25. If you have an idea that you can't get out of your head, do a startup. Otherwise join a startup.
Fred Wilson
#26. 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
#27. As of 2011, it cost about $5,000 to launch a tech startup.
Peter Diamandis
#28. The way forward is to learn to see every startup in any industry as a grand experiment.
Eric Ries
#29. If you can't develop a lot of paying customers for your product, you don't really have a business to build.
Timothy Freriks
#30. You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible.
Paul Graham
#31. 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
#32. Recruiting talent is no different than any other challenge a startup faces. It's all about selling.
Vivek Wadhwa
#33. Make a start, even if you have a controversial idea!
Abhishek Ratna
#34. When it comes to starting startups, in many ways, it's easier to start a hard startup than an easy startup.
Sam Altman
#35. Starting a startup is a process of trial and error. What guided the founders through this process was their empathy for the users. They never lost sight of making things that people would want.
Jessica Livingston
#36. A hardware startup with no funding is a risky venture.
Brendan Iribe
#37. My most radical shift was leaving Intel and joining Google, a small startup at the time, even though I was pregnant.
Susan Wojcicki
#38. Developing a good, healthy culture is extremely important at a startup. Culture reflects the essence of a startup's operation because it directly affects the success of a company's hiring practices and overall strategy.
Scott Weiss
#39. Everyone starting a startup for the first time is scared, and everyone feels like a bit of an imposter.
Sam Altman
#40. The answers to all a startup's challenges are out there. By setting up the right mechanisms for gathering feedback, the road to success can be a less bumpy ride.
Jay Samit
#41. So always keep momentum, it's this prime directive for managing a startup.
Sam Altman
#42. 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
#43. Paul Buchheit: Then you have what we do with PCs, and that's technically pretty challenging - to take this big network of machines that are unreliable and build a big, reliable storage system out of it.
Jessica Livingston
#44. Working on a startup is a balancing act: being crazy enough to believe your idea can take off but not crazy enough to miss the signs when it's clearly not going to.
Mike Krieger
#45. A startup is a team of people on a mission, and a good culture is just what that looks like on the inside.
Peter Thiel
#46. If you're building a startup or any sort of organization, take a few moments to reflect on the qualities that the people you most enjoy working with embody and the user experience of new people joining your organization, from the offer letter to their first day.
Matt Mullenweg
#47. A lot of entrepreneurs hate big companies. But if you hate them so much, why are you trying to build a new one? The truth is, as soon as a startup has any kind of success whatsoever, it will face big company problems.
Eric Ries
#48. Thou shalt not invest in a needless business. Thou shalt not trade time for money. Thou shalt not operate on a limited scale. Thou shalt not relinquish control. Thou shalt not let a business startup be an event over process.
M.J. DeMarco
#49. Founding a successful startup is no different than forming a rock band.
Jay Samit
#50. There are so many similarities between a startup venture and a political campaign - the rhythm, the tempo, the hours, the intensity.
Mike McCurry
#51. In the early stage of a startup, hiring senior people is usually a mistake. You just want people that get stuff done.
Sam Altman
#52. Part of the magic of a startup is the fear of death. You have only so much money in the bank, and if you don't get to the right milestone before you run out, then the company goes under - it's over.
Scott Weiss
#53. A startup is the largest endeavor over which you can have definite mastery. You can have agency not just over your own life, but over a small and important part of the world. It begins by rejecting the unjust tyranny of Chance. You are not a lottery ticket.
Peter Thiel
#54. It's easy to move fast or be obsessed with quality, but the trick is you have to do both at a startup.
Sam Altman
#55. You need this sort of a tailwind to make a startup successful.
Sam Altman
#56. I don't believe ever in shared office spaces. Peter talks a little bit about this, every good startup is a cult. It's very hard to create a cult if you're sharing space with people.
Keith Rabois
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. The goal of every startup experiment is to discover how to build a sustainable business around that vision.
Eric Ries
#60. Properly defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future.
Peter Thiel
#61. When Facebook first started, and it was just a social directory for undergrads at Harvard, it would have seemed like such a bad startup idea, like some student side project.
Paul Graham
#62. An entrepreneur without funding is a musician without an instrument.
Robert A. Rice Jr.
#63. There's no way I know, to get through the pain of a startup without belief that the mission really matters.
Sam Altman
#64. In a startup, in the early days, it can be hard to explain what you do.
Trip Adler
#65. Building a great team is the lifeblood of any startup, and finding great talent is one of the hardest and costliest tasks any CEO will ever face.
Jay Samit
#66. Every thing at a startup gets modeled after the founders. Whatever the founders do becomes the culture.
Sam Altman
#67. I think extreme secrecy is a bad sign in all startups. Very few startups die because they tell you exactly how their technology works. On the long list of startup killers, that's pretty far down. Though on the list of entrepreneur fears, it's pretty high.
Sam Altman
#68. A lot of my energy is going to Code for America, Jen Pahlka's non-profit startup. We're doing a lot of great work teaching government how to apply technology and changing the culture of government.
Tim O'Reilly
#69. A NASA-funded study estimates that if the price of a ticket to space approached $100,000, close to a million people would buy one. That's a $100 billion industry. Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen gave me $20 million in startup funding to go after that market.
Burt Rutan
#70. A startup is a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.
Steve Blank
#71. The only way to train for a startup is by starting.
Chris Campbell
#72. It takes years and years, usually a decade, to create a great startup.
Sam Altman
#73. In an era of endless innovation and constant disruption, what is any company really worth? How does a startup determine its valuation?
Jay Samit
#74. 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
#75. Working at a startup to make a lot of money was never a thing, and that's why I decided to just finish up school. That was way more important for me.
Kevin Systrom
#76. A startup's job is to (1) rigorously measure where it is right now, confronting the hard truths that assessment reveals, and then (2) devise experiments to learn how to move the real numbers closer to the ideal reflected in the business plan.
Eric Ries
#77. That's a problem. I mean, like any sort of growing startup organization, we are sort of overwhelmed by our growth. And that means we're getting enormous quantity of whistleblower disclosures of a very high caliber, but don't have enough people to actually process and vet this information.
Julian Assange
#78. Early in a startup, product decisions should be hunch driven. Later on, product decisions should be data driven.
Fred Wilson
#79. By the way, that's my number one piece of advice if you're going to join a startup: pick a rocket ship.
Sam Altman
#80. It doesn't matter if you call it a boom or a bubble. The startup business moves in cycles, and what goes up will eventually come down.
Eric Ries
#81. 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
#82. In the early days of a startup, people's compensation is whatever you negotiate with a founder and it's all over the place.
Sam Altman
#83. The Lean Startup has evolved into a movement that is having a significant impact on how companies are built, funded and scaled.
Eric Ries
#84. 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
#85. I had started at a small startup as a big-company guy. Now I was leaving a big company as a small-startup guy.
Douglas Edwards
#86. A lot of the machines that Google is built on - commodity is the polite word for them - they're regular PCs and so they're not always the most reliable.
Jessica Livingston
#87. Passion gets an entrepreneur through the startup days and the enormous efforts it takes to build a business.
Peter Diamandis
#89. 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
#90. Investing in a startup does not make you an entrepreneur any more than buying a grand piano makes you a concert pianist.
Jeffrey Fry
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. That's the part where the governments have a unique role, and then when it progresses well enough, then existing companies or new startup companies should take it. In the $3 trillion a year energy market, the rewards will be quite fantastic.
Bill Gates
#94. Like a tracer running through the veins of the city, networks of air quality sensors attached to bikes can help measure an individual's exposure to pollution and draw a dynamic map of the urban air on a human scale, as in the case of the Copenhagen Wheel developed by new startup Superpedestrian.
Carlo Ratti
#95. I think the single most reassuring thing about doing a startup is knowing in advance how difficult it is going to be.
Jared Tame
#96. Start each day with a positive thought and a grateful heart.
Roy Bennett
#97. As great as you believe your new product or company is, the world got along just fine without you. The greatest competition every startup faces is convincing consumers that there is a better solution to the problems that vex them.
Jay Samit
#98. In 2000, just before the first dot-com bubble burst, it cost a whopping $5 million to launch a tech startup.
Peter Diamandis
#99. On Startups: "I hate it when people call themselves "entrepreneurs" when what they're really trying to do is launch a startup and then sell or go public, so they can cash in and move on.
Walter Isaacson
#100. Every startup has a chance to change the world, by bringing not just a new product, but an entirely new institution into existence.
Eric Ries
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