Top 100 Quotes About Founders
#1. Founders need sizable egos to believe that what they are creating is good enough to change the world. What makes for great co-founders is having those egos focused on complementary, not competing, skills.
Jay Samit
#2. Most founders have not managed people before, and they certainly haven't managed managers.
Sam Altman
#3. In YC experience, 2 or 3 co-founders seems to be about perfect.
Sam Altman
#4. In revealing the workings of government that led to the Vietnam War, the newspapers nobly did precisely that which the Founders hoped and trusted they would do.
Hugo Black
#5. That is good. It is a law of nature. That is the way with all founders of religion. Without persecution superior ideas cannot penetrate into the heart of society.
Swami Vivekananda
#6. There's nothing more invigorating than being deeply involved with a small company and a young team of founders out to do something incredibly special.
Michael Moritz
#7. The track record for founders that don't already know each other is really bad.
Sam Altman
#8. Google's founders have had a good eye for imagining what technologies will be significant in the near future. No one asked Google to develop self-driving cars, but it helped them with street views for Google Maps.
Barry Ritholtz
#9. But language founders in such seas. Better to picture it in your head if you want to feel it.
Yann Martel
#10. What I tell founders is not to sweat the business model too much at first. The most important task at first is to build something people want. If you don't do that, it won't matter how clever your business model is.
Paul Graham
#11. Should founders of our lands one day wake up for a moment from their lasting sleep to see the lands and things they founded, they shall really have so many reasons to ponder over their lasting footprints!
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#12. I want a president who will teach our children that everyone in this country matters, a president who truly believes in the vision that our Founders put forth all those years ago that we are all created equal, each a beloved part of the great American story.
Michelle Obama
#13. Big-government proponents embrace both the power of the federal government and the idea that millions of Americans ought to be dependent on its largesse. It's time to return to our Founders' love for small government. More is not always better.
Gary Bauer
#14. Our Founders always wondered about how long it would last. The price of liberty is everlasting vigilance. You've got to be on your guard every minute or you will lose it.
Michael Novak
#15. Under the United States Constitution, the federal government has no authority to hold states "accountable" for their education performance ... In the free society envisioned by the founders, schools are held accountable to parents, not federal bureaucrats.
Ron Paul
#16. This is perhaps the most important statement on religion ever made. It clarified the intent of the founders of the constitution irrespective of the attempts of modern day religious revisionists ...
Thomas Jefferson
#17. For the top twenty most valuable YC companies, all of them have at least two founders.
Sam Altman
#18. I stand here today as hopeful as ever that the United States of America will endure, that it will prevail, that the dream of our founders will live on in our time.
Barack Obama
#19. Most people are average. Founders are not. Founders' traits seem to have an inverse normal distribution to them.
Peter Thiel
#20. The Founders didn't mention political parties when they wrote the Constitution, and George Washington in essence warned us against them in his Farewell Address.
Marianne Williamson
#21. Upon entering into the divine domain of transcendence, all these religious founders truly felt that they had accessed the true meaning of the universe, while in reality, what they had access to, in that state of mind, was their inner self.
Abhijit Naskar
#22. By such literalism, fundamentalism, religions betrayed the best intentions of their founders. Reducing thought to formula, replacing choice by obedience, these preachers turned the living word into dead law.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#23. Beyond any question, the way the American founders consistently linked faith and freedom, republicanism and religion, was not only deliberate and thoughtful, it was also surprising and anything but routine.
Os Guinness
#24. Unlike people, companies outlive their founders and their leaders.
Ursula Burns
#25. Founders should think of their company as a product and build it and shape it with the same passion and care.
Roelof Botha
#26. When I look at founders and CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook and Brian Chesky at Airbnb and Sebastian Thrun at Udacity, these are companies that are creating extraordinary social good and extraordinary economic and educational empowerment, all within with context of a for-profit model.
Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen
#27. Their way of Dancing, is nothing but a sort of stamping Motion, much like the treading upon Founders Bellows.
John Lawson
#28. RUTHERFORD PIERCE TO LEAD REPORTERS ON TOUR OF FOUNDERS MEDIA HEADQUARTERS SITE IN DOWNTOWN BOSTON.
Jude Watson
#29. Our Founders warned against this. They said don't ... that your liberty is only as secure as the people are. Because once they, um, get the ability to vote themselves entitlements from the largesse of the government, liberty is done; freedom is over with. We were warned. We are there.
Sharron Angle
#30. I believe the two biggest mistakes made by the Founders were giving Federal judges life-time appointments and permitting them to be confirmed without the agreement of two-thirds of the members of the United States Senate.
John Jay Hooker
#31. How significant is Aristotle? Well, I wouldn't want to exaggerate, so let me put it this way: Abandoning Aristotelianism, as the founders of modern philosophy did, was the single greatest mistake ever made in the entire history of Western thought.
Edward Feser
#32. Carol Frohlinger and Deborah Kolb, founders of Negotiating Women, Inc., describe this as the "Tiara Syndrome," where women "expect that if they keep doing their job well someone will notice them and place a tiara on their head."9
Sheryl Sandberg
#33. Really dig into projects people have worked on and call references; that is another thing that first time founders like to skip.
Sam Altman
#34. Losing focus is another way that founders get off track.
Sam Altman
#35. I see many founders waste too much time trying to work their networks and/or ultimately settle for mediocre but available candidates. You will definitely have to interview hard for cultural fit, but the best talent isn't cheap.
Scott Weiss
#36. The more we see the founders as humans the more we can understand them.
David McCullough
#37. We have this powerful lever at Google Ventures, which is to invest $200 million a year. This is a huge lever. It's not all going into one place; it's going into lots of start ups and founders and entrepreneurs, all of which are levers to try and change the world in one way or another.
Bill Maris
#38. The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#39. By maintaining an active feedback system at every stage of a startup, founders can reduce their burn rate, increase their virality coefficient, and retain key hires.
Jay Samit
#40. No, the founders of our culture didn't just fall into a lifestyle of total dependence on agriculture, they had to whip themselves into it, and the whip they used was this meme: Growing all your own food is the best way to live. Nothing less could imaginably have done this amazing trick.
Daniel Quinn
#41. The Internet has made us richer, freer, connected and informed in ways its founders could not have dreamt of. It has also become a vector of attack, espionage, crime and harm.
George Osborne
#42. I want to express my deepest condolences at the passing of Steve Jobs, one of the founders of our industry and a true visionary. My heart goes out to his family, everyone at Apple and everyone who has been touched by his work,
Steve Ballmer
#43. The notion of a rigid separation between church and state has no basis in either the text of the Constitution or the writings of our Founding Fathers. On the contrary, our Founders' political views were strongly informed by their religious beliefs.
Ron Paul
#44. Samuel Marshak was one of the founders of modern Russian children's literature. Soviet children used to know his poems by heart, but only since glasnost have American editors shown any interest in issuing his poems here.
Michael Patrick Hearn
#45. Where tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers therefore are the founders of human civilization.
Daniel Webster
#46. So now we're after a constitutional amendment that defines marriage as a guy-and-gal thing. To the founders, this would have been like an amendment requiring the sun to rise in the east; it would fall under the category of obvious truths that the Constitution need not address.
James Lileks
#47. Twitter is not a business. I know its founders would like to think it is. It is, for the most part, a diversion.
Mark McKinnon
#48. The Founders who crafted our Constitution and Bill of Rights were careful to draft a Constitution of limited powers - one that would protect Americans' liberty at all times - both in war, and in peace.
Al Franken
#49. We had so many different presidents, including Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln - there were other founders like Hamilton, Adams - who made it very clear that the courts can't make a law. The Constitution is expressly clear that that's a power reserved to Congress.
Mike Huckabee
#50. The Establishment Clause ... stands as an expression of principle on the part of the Founders ... that religion is too personal, too sacred, too holy, to permit its 'unhallowed perversion' by a civil magistrate.
Hugo Black
#51. The First Amendment was written by the Founders to protect the free exercise of Christianity.
Bryan Fischer
#52. Our culture has forgotten what the Founders knew: The American experiment is a moral, not just a political, exercise.
Charles Colson
#53. When the Constitution was written, the founders had no way of anticipating the new technologies that would evolve in the coming centuries.
Al Franken
#54. The First Continental Congress made its first act a prayer, the beginning of a great tradition. We have then a lesson from the founders of our land. That lesson is clear: That in the winning of freedom and in the living of life, the first step is prayer.
Ronald Reagan
#55. Perhaps the efforts of the true poets, founders, religions, literatures, all ages, have been, and ever will be, our time and times to come, essentially the same - to bring people back from their present strayings and sickly abstractions, to the costless, average, divine, original concrete.
Walt Whitman
#56. In essence, Clinton's Anti-Terrorism Act would set up a national police force, over the long-dead bodies of the founders.
Gore Vidal
#57. It's not hard for a city like New York to create a $1.25 million fund. It's not hard for foundations to create funds that invest in diverse founders.
Kathryn Finney
#58. The Founders warned that a free society depends on a virtuous and moral people. The current crisis reflects that their concerns were justified.
Ron Paul
#59. The truth is that our democracy is a work in progress. We are all its founders. We are all learning that we are linked and not ranked.
Amy Richards
#60. If we completely repealed the estate tax, it would provide an estimated $32 billion tax break for the Walton family - the founders of Wal-Mart.
Bernie Sanders
#61. The ship founders on a sandbank and then gets back afloat. Electric power stops; after a while, the machines start up again. During such recesses, the anarch measures his own strength and autonomy.
Ernst Junger
#63. If you don't have savings, and your co-founders are as poor as you are, and if Mom and Dad won't loan you money, then your best bet is to find people that know you - your friends. If they, too, won't help, then you're stuck seeking out angel investors.
Vivek Wadhwa
#64. We pretty much won't fund a company now where the founders don't have vested equity because it's just that hard to do.
Sam Altman
#65. Taking the state wherever found, striking into its history at any point, one sees no way to differentiate the activities of its founders, administrators, and beneficiaries from those of a professional criminal class.
Albert J. Nock
#66. Great companies start because the founders want to change the world ... not make a fast buck.
Guy Kawasaki
#67. Today's widespread relegation of religion to merely something people do only in the privacy of their homes or churches would have been unimaginable to the founders of the republic - even those who personally repudiated orthodox Christian faith.
Charles Colson
#68. Two other things that we hear again and again from our founders, they wish they had done earlier, and that is ... simply writing down how you do things and why you do things.
Sam Altman
#69. Whatever America's founders believed about Christianity - and they believed a wide range of things - they clearly rejected the idea of an established church.
Parker Palmer
#70. The founders of the great world religions, Gautama Buddha, Jesus, Lao-Tzu, Mohammed, all seem to have striven for a worldwide brotherhood of man; but none of them could develop institutions which would include the enemy, the unbeliever.
Geoffrey Gorer
#71. The Federalist Society is changing the culture of our nation's law schools. You are returning the values and concepts of law as our founders understood them to scholarly dialogue, and through that dialogue, to our legal institutions.
Ronald Reagan
#72. When we first started Glitch, there were four co-founders of the company. We built Flickr and worked together at Yahoo and then started Tiny Speck. We were split in Vancouver, New York, and San Francisco. So we used an old chat technology called IRC. Almost nothing went through email.
Stewart Butterfield
#73. Many founders hire just because it seems like a cool thing to do, and people always ask how many employees you have.
Sam Altman
#74. Today it would be progress if everyone would stop talking about values. Instead, let us talk, as the Founders did, about virtues.
George Will
#75. We have allowed an unholy alliance of government - the new monarchy - and corporate influence - the new aristocracy - to take control of events in a way that would have made our Founders shudder.
Marianne Williamson
#76. The Senate was an odd compromise between the founders and the early leaders of the republic who wanted a single house which was based on popular sovereignty representing the people and those founders who wanted two houses, the upper house, the Senate, being the more aristocratic.
George Packer
#77. The thing that kills startups at some level, is the founders giving up.
Sam Altman
#79. Thiel rejects the small-mindedness of most of the Valley's entrepreneurialism. The motto of Founders Fund is: "We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters." But
Richard Byrne Reilly
#81. Team members need to feel trusted and valued, and micromanaging communicates the opposite. Founders who are prone to manage every detail of their businesses will ultimately kill themselves as well as lose the support of team members. Learn to delegate key tasks and give credit.
Martin Zwilling
#82. Our government is an agency of delegated and strictly limited powers. Its founders did not look to its preservation by force; but the chain they wove to bind these States together was one of love and mutual good offices ...
Jefferson Davis
#83. Should two founders split the company right down the middle? Answer you're looking for: No, you should allocate 25 percent to future employees and 35 percent to the first two rounds of investments. That leaves 40 percent for the founders to split among themselves.
Guy Kawasaki
#84. We should understand the Constitution as the founders meant that it should be understood. We can do this by reading their words about it, such as those contained in the Federalist Papers. Such understanding is essential if we are to preserve what God has given us.
Ezra Taft Benson
#85. I still do find the prayers of the Kaddish quite moving, and I just substitute in my mind nature, although that's what the founders did in a lot of their documents, too. They substituted nature or providence for God. I think that's what I do in my head with Jewish God.
Susan Jacoby
#86. 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
#87. The founders of Snapchat last year turned down a $3 billion offer from Facebook and a $4 billion offer from Google. It was a surprising show of integrity from the guys who invented the app that lets you look at pictures of boobs for five seconds.
Cecily Strong
#88. Founders often had to step aside to let corporate "grown-ups" raise their babies - that was just how Silicon Valley worked.
Gina Keating
#89. The American tradition of separation of church and state grew directly from the freethinking of the Founders. After political independence, they considered independence of thought and belief a logical next step.
Joshua Wolf Shenk
#90. We always talk about how you have to build a brand from the inside out, not the outside in. Brands are not wrappers. Brands are based on the values of the founders, and then they spread to the people who work for the company, and then that psychological contract is spread to the customer.
Dan Levitan
#91. What I worry about would be that you essentially have two chambers, the House and the Senate, but you have simply, majoritarian, absolute power on either side. And that's just not what the founders intended.
Barack Obama
#92. The media often glamorizes successful founders and makes their paths seem easier than they actually were.
Jessica Livingston
#93. The Founders believed these same principles would work for any nation. The key was using the government to protect equal rights, not to provide equal things.
W. Cleon Skousen
#94. I'm still one who says that we can get rid of the Internal Revenue Service if we would pass the fair tax, which is a tax on consumption rather than a tax on people's income, and move power back where the founders believed it should have been all along.
Mike Huckabee
#95. Live the principles and the values. Almost nobody in America is living them. Learn the truth. Live the life of our founders. Be a decent, righteous, forthright honest man or woman.
Beck
#96. The founders of our nation feared paper currency because it gave government the means to steal from its citizens.
Walter E. Williams
#97. The founders and grand theorists of modern (quantum and relativity) physics: Einstein, Schroedinger, Heisenberg, Bohr, Eddington, Pauli, de Broglie, Jeans, and Planck.
Ken Wilber
#98. It is well for us if we have learned to listen to the sweet persuasion of the Beatitudes, but there are crises in all lives which require also the emphatic "Thou shalt not" of the decalogue which the founders wrote on the gateposts of their commonwealth.
John Greenleaf Whittier
#99. It is the privilege and duty of the present generation to pass on to its successors, unimpaired, the heritage of liberty bequeathed to it by the founders of the Republic.
George B. Cortelyou
#100. One of the blessings I've had, really, for my entire career, is working with founders of companies, whether it was Bill Ziff at Ziff Davis or with Jerry Yang and David Filo at Yahoo.
Dan Rosensweig
