Paul Allen Quotes

Whenever you start a new business, the sheer number of variables at hand makes failure a constant possibility.

The entire time I was modeling, I was trying and failing at businesses. In fact, we would have started our business much sooner had I been more successful.

Sometimes your worst competitors are the ones which are dying because they do stupid things.

One of the big failures for the big auto companies is that even the CEO and the top management often don't understand design and manufacturing. As a CEO, you have to make decisions; you need to have knowledge.

There's one thing I've learned about entrepreneurs' business plans. Every one is wrong.

So many of the major decisions that affect the entire future of your enterprise happen during its first year in business. In fact, most don't make it because they don't know how to get the resources they need to survive.

Doing a me-too business, because it's you - the only person who cares about that is you. The market doesn't care if it's you. The market is pretty much being served. You better have something that the world doesn't have, because even then, you might screw it up through your own ineptitude and inexperience.

The key to our business, it's a lot of research.

Every successful businessman will have experienced set-backs and failures - they're lying if they say they haven't. Virgin has had some tremendously successful businesses and some that have not quite worked out. Virgin Cola springs to mind - the product wasn't distinct enough from Coca-Cola.

I nearly failed when Virgin was in its infancy; I nearly failed in the early 1980s, and, of course, I have nearly died more than once trying to achieve a world record for boating or ballooning. But through a combination of luck and planning, both Virgin and I are still here.

Over the years, I've been involved in many business crises. I qualify this, since my crises have never involved life and death or the survival of the human race. But they are still crises.

As a small business owner, you may not have the luxury to throw good money after bad, but if you can ascertain the 'why' of the failure, you can draw some significance from it and then turn it into something that clients will buy.

A startup, to a some degree, is a set of those challenges of, 'If you don't solve this, you're dead.'

Objectively speaking, Traf-O-Data was a failure as a company. Right as our business started to pick up, states began to provide their own traffic-counting services to local governments for free.

I research best practices and recipes for success and failure to craft personalised policies for my city.

I see business as an ecosystem.

It is incredibly important to set goals for your business, as if you have no direction for your business, your online business will be a failure.

When I came to the U.S., I tried to take shortcuts to make money - but everything crashed.

Going forward, we will focus on building the very best Windows phones on a quicker timeline. We will also focus on the channels and markets that offer the best returns. This is a similar approach to the one we have taken with Surface, which has been very successful.

For every company that sees the value of their capital go up, there's another company that has been disrupted, and the value of their capital gets marked down because it's not going to compete in the same way.

Wrestling promotions are kind of like new religions - nine out of 10 fail in the first year.

Entrepreneurs always begin the journey believing that they have the next big idea. They dream of the fame and fortune that awaits them if only they had the funding to pursue it. But the reality is that as the product is built and shared with customers, flaws in their concept are discovered that - if not overcome - will kill the business.

If you get the product and technology right, then the rest usually falls into place.

I lost my computer business when I was 29 because I gave credit to firms I didn't investigate. I lost my house and had to move back in with my parents and then I lived in an office for six months.

Every business makes big mistakes along the way.