Mohnish Pabrai Quotes

Great entrepreneurs focus intensely on an opportunity where others see nothing.

I love the business of business; I love the risk raking.

Business is all about risk taking and managing uncertainties and turbulence.

Companies that grow for the sake of growth or that expand into areas outside their core business strategy often stumble. On the other hand, companies that build scale for the benefit of their customers and shareholders more often succeed over time.

Most entrepreneurs are merely technicians with an entrepreneurial seizure. Most entrepreneurs fail because you are working IN your business rather than ON your business.

Business has only two functions - marketing and innovation.

If you're not a risk taker, you should get the hell out of business.

If companies don't think systemically enough - if they try to capture too much of the value - eventually, innovation moves somewhere else.

The tools used by economists to analyze business firms are too abstract and speculative to offer any guidance to entrepreneurs and managers in their constant struggle to bring novel products to consumers at low cost.

I've said it for four decades - work 'on' your business, not just 'in' your business!

Entrepreneurs are moving from a world of problem-solving to a world of problem-finding. The very best ones are able to uncover problems people didn't realize that they had.

I see business as an ecosystem.

Our job is to find out what's the next thing that is going to be advantageous to us and contribute to winning.

Entrepreneurs love to view risk as binary. The more you put on the line, the greater the potential for reward.

In the media business and as a creative executive, if you don't take risks, you're dead in the water. Calculated risk-taking is essential for success.

I'm generally risk averse, and most great entrepreneurs I know are as well.

With a wonderful business, you can figure out what will happen; you can't figure out when it will happen. You don't want to focus on when, you want to focus on what. If you're right about what, you don't have to worry about when

I didn't generate my success by being a prognosticator. I developed my reputation building our businesses by building great businesses and making them more efficient.

I have seen entrepreneurs ask for hundreds of millions of dollars on a concept and try to sell because of 'their passion' for an idea. If the idea is that good, why wouldn't I cut you out and hire someone who is just as passionate for much, much less?

In the private sector, there is always innovation. There's always change. There's always improving productivity, and if you're not leading that, you'll be passed and ultimately go out of business. So there's an urgency to constantly update and renew and to rethink your enterprise.

There are so many opportunities to make a bad decision in building a robot company on top of all the normal ways that entrepreneurs screw up that it is incredibly difficult to truly create value because it is so cost-sensitive.

It's not wise to limit firms' expansion projects. Let us only be limited by the market.

In any business, you have to evolve.

The most essential thing for us was to get the business model right, then put the world-class technology under it to support it. At Merrill, that meant not doing what people expected.

Entrepreneurs are great at dealing with uncertainty and also very good at minimizing risk. That's the classic great entrepreneur.