Top 100 Startup Quotes
#1. You're better off being The Beatles than The Monkees, as a startup ...
Ben Horowitz
#2. Everyone has an idea. But it's really about executing the idea and attracting other people to help you work on the idea.
Jack Dorsey
#3. When you're doing a startup, life is not all roses and rainbows, like you see on Instagram, and killing it.
Paige Craig
#4. 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
#5. You have to be decisive. Indecisiveness is a startup killer.
Sam Altman
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. It turns out that no undergrad class prepares you to start a startup - you learn most of it as you do it.
Kevin Systrom
#14. More important than starting any startup, is getting to know a lot of potential co-founders.
Sam Altman
#15. Volatility and length, that's the value on an option. 10 years on a startup stock, that's a big valuable thing.
Ben Horowitz
#16. 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
#17. The lean startup method is not about cost, it is about speed.
Eric Ries
#18. 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
#20. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. When you are a startup you need to hire very fast, and sometimes you have to restructure very fast.
Maurice Levy
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. It's a very valuable skill to succeed in life whether you work for a startup or a Fortune 500 company.
Guy Kawasaki
#29. Thiel's law": a startup messed up at its foundation cannot be fixed.
Peter Thiel
#30. When Thomas and John Knoll launched Photoshop 1.0 in 1990, the software couldn't even handle color images. But their offerings got the startup noticed by Apple and Adobe, both of whom became key to the fledgling company's later success.
Jay Samit
#31. 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
#32. A startup can focus on only one metric. So you have to decide what that is and ignore everything else.
Noah Kagan
#33. 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
#34. We have some good ideas here. But the only way to know if they're workable is to try to make them fail. If we fail to fail, then maybe we're on the right track.
Orson Scott Card
#35. If you have an idea that you can't get out of your head, do a startup. Otherwise join a startup.
Fred Wilson
#36. 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
#37. As of 2011, it cost about $5,000 to launch a tech startup.
Peter Diamandis
#38. The way forward is to learn to see every startup in any industry as a grand experiment.
Eric Ries
#39. Early on, with any startup show, you're really building credibility and making it stand on its own.
David Boreanaz
#40. If you can't develop a lot of paying customers for your product, you don't really have a business to build.
Timothy Freriks
#41. 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
#42. Halcyon people have put aside and left their homes, their million dollar salaries, full professorships at major universities, and fully seed-funded startup companies to be part of this effort.
Luke Nosek
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. Recruiting talent is no different than any other challenge a startup faces. It's all about selling.
Vivek Wadhwa
#46. Most phenomenal startup teams create businesses that ultimately fail. Why? They built something that nobody wanted.
Eric Ries
#47. 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
#48. Make a start, even if you have a controversial idea!
Abhishek Ratna
#49. When it comes to starting startups, in many ways, it's easier to start a hard startup than an easy startup.
Sam Altman
#50. 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
#51. A hardware startup with no funding is a risky venture.
Brendan Iribe
#52. My most radical shift was leaving Intel and joining Google, a small startup at the time, even though I was pregnant.
Susan Wojcicki
#53. 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
#54. Everyone starting a startup for the first time is scared, and everyone feels like a bit of an imposter.
Sam Altman
#55. Wealth isn't about money. It's about options...and you always have options. Choose wisely. Live wealthy.
Richie Norton
#56. 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
#57. So always keep momentum, it's this prime directive for managing a startup.
Sam Altman
#58. 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
#59. Whether by design or circumstance, every startup will eventually get disrupted.
Jay Samit
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. Please don't get hung up on this question of whether you need to have experience in an industry before you launch your startup.
Richard Branson
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. Every startup CEO should understand Gamification, because gaming is the new normal.
Bing Gordon
#70. I want the definition of startup back. To be used by anybody who is willing to take the risk to quit their corporate job and go out and try and build an innovative, disruptive, tech-enabled business that tries to change the way things work in the world.
Mark Suster
#71. Most startups eventually pivot to adjust to what the market is telling them.
Alejandro Cremades
#72. Founding a successful startup is no different than forming a rock band.
Jay Samit
#73. There are so many similarities between a startup venture and a political campaign - the rhythm, the tempo, the hours, the intensity.
Mike McCurry
#74. In the early stage of a startup, hiring senior people is usually a mistake. You just want people that get stuff done.
Sam Altman
#75. Our promise was to deliver value before profit, ...
Biz Stone
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. Embrace iteration as the road to improvement, but don't let that lull you into rolling out poorly-thought-out crap.
Kate O'Neill
#80. Rule #1: Sweat equity is the best startup capital
Mark Cuban
#81. You need this sort of a tailwind to make a startup successful.
Sam Altman
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. The goal of every startup experiment is to discover how to build a sustainable business around that vision.
Eric Ries
#86. Most startup failures result from entrepreneurs who are better at making excuses than products.
Jay Samit
#87. It took less time to build 'Instagram' than it did for me to get my work visa. The app was an instant hit, and Facebook agreed to acquire the startup for about $1 billion in April 2012.
Mike Krieger
#88. Properly defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future.
Peter Thiel
#89. Startup success is driven most by the product passion, quality, vision, team-work and persistence of the founding team and the talent that the team attracts.
Jim Breyer
#90. 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
#91. An entrepreneur without funding is a musician without an instrument.
Robert A. Rice Jr.
#92. There's no way I know, to get through the pain of a startup without belief that the mission really matters.
Sam Altman
#93. In a startup, in the early days, it can be hard to explain what you do.
Trip Adler
#94. Hold at least one all-hands meeting every quarter and, to underscore the startup's team concept, make sure at least one additional executive joins you in leading the meeting.
Scott Weiss
#95. I got really excited about the idea of data-driven startup just as I was starting Kaggle.
Anthony Goldbloom
#96. 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
#97. Every thing at a startup gets modeled after the founders. Whatever the founders do becomes the culture.
Sam Altman
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. Brands that stand out from the competition are purposefully disruptive or different
Bernard Kelvin Clive
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
