Richard Branson Quotes

Breaking the rules and challenging convention is in the DNA of every successful entrepreneur.

Most entrepreneurial ideas will sound crazy, stupid and uneconomic, and then they'll turn out to be right.

I'd never worked in fashion or retail. I just needed an undergarment that didn't exist.

To be successful, you don't have to have all this crazy start-up capital or a ton of knowledge. I think it's actually helpful sometimes to not know all the rules because that way it's easier to break them.

Build a company that changes the way things get done!

In a startup, there have to be challenges. Otherwise, someone else would have done it already. And that's almost the most exciting part.

The people who built Silicon Valley were engineers. They learned business, they learned a lot of different things, but they had a real belief that humans, if they worked hard with other creative, smart people, could solve most of humankind's problems. I believe that very much.

I'm also a big believer of being a scrappy entrepreneur. To be successful you don't have to have all this crazy start-up capital or a ton of knowledge. I think it's actually helpful sometimes to not know all the rules because that way it's easier to break them. And that's why it's so much easier for younger people, I think, to start companies that are challenging more traditional business models than older people. Especially if you're trying to do something good.

In Silicon Valley, if you spend a lot of time thinking about the obstacles, you'll talk yourself out of everything, because the more you look at it, the less logical something sounds, since no one has done it yet.

Answers are not enough, students should be encouraged to ask questions and explore alternatives to the norm. Entrepreneurship and invention are the backbone of the new economy, yet I doubt they get more than a nod in economics courses.

If I had known how hard it would be to do something new, particularly in the payments industry, I would never have started PayPal. That's why nobody with long experience in banking had done it. You needed to be naive enough to think that new things could be done.

To create an organization that's adaptable and innovative, people need the freedom to challenge precedent, to 'waste' time, to go outside of channels, to experiment, to take risks and to follow their passions.

When we started Skype, if you look at analyst reports, no one forecasted it as a big business. Also when Google started, it was not fashionable to be in search. It's not trying to do the obvious - that's the hard part.

Nobody talks of entrepreneurship as survival, but that's exactly what it is and what nurtures creative thinking.

By definition, startups are not constrained by the limits of established company culture. And so they push boundaries and develop new technologies and ways of doing things.

You look at any industry - you're not innovating unless people are questioning it. If you're innovating, you're doing something nobody's done before, which means you're re-writing rules, resetting boundaries, re-creating systems. And that means the traditional industry is going to question it.

When you innovate, you've got to be prepared for everyone telling you you're nuts.

If the idea is really new and unique and big, other people will all think it is bad and is going to fail.

The great thing is that young talent isn't tied to a how-to model for starting a line; we get to find new ways to go about doing things. And don't let people tell you you can't. Go find a way to show that you can.

In any field, find the strangest thing and then explore it.

It always helps to have someone who can say, No, we can do it faster this way, or We have to break the rules, even our own rules, to get things done.

I'm an entrepreneur. I always have been. I am curious, and I enjoy solving problems.

Democracy tends to be a collaborative process, a committee, a consensus. Silicon Valley tends to believe in the individual who creates a small group and does something big.

Innovation happens everywhere.

Every once in a while, a new technology, an old problem, and a big idea turn into an innovation.