Stephen A. Schwarzman Quotes

Salads was a big indicator of that - there was a huge market out there for it. And why not tap it? Some of the things we are doing now around the globe are responding to customers. It's not because some guy sued you.

There are two ways to extend a business. Take inventory of what you're good at and extend out from your skills. Or determine what your customers need and work backward, even if it requires learning new skills. Kindle is an example of working backward.

The grim reality is that most start-ups fail. Most new products are not successful. Yet the story of perseverance, creative genius, and hard work persists.

Everyone is an entrepreneur. The only skills you need to be an entrepreneur: an ability to fail, an ability to have ideas, to sell those ideas, to execute on those ideas, and to be persistent so even as you fail you learn and move onto the next adventure.

You don't see a lot of great companies built on easy problems to solve.

A lot of entrepreneurship is seeing the future in a way that no one else sees it. Then, it becomes about execution and doing what it takes to succeed.

To succeed in business, to reach the top, an individual must know all it is possible to know about that business.

Most of what we've done at SurveyMonkey is create a market, which I would say is much harder than trying to enter a market that already exists. But if you get it right, it can become a great business.

The trick is, a market has to be nonexistent when you start. If the market is large early on, you will have too many competitors. You have to make it large.

One of the top causes of startup death - right after cofounder problems - is building something no one wants.

I think there's space in the market for a half-dozen kind of polling analysts.

Part of the challenge of being an entrepreneur, if you're going for a really huge opportunity, is trying to find problems that aren't quite on the radar yet and try to solve those.

You should learn from your competitor, but never copy. Copy and you die.

Don't bother starting the 10,000th restaurant in Manhattan. Find something to do that if you don't do it, it won't get done.

No one should expect building a new high-growth, software-powered company in an established industry to be easy. It's brutally difficult.

I think the mistake people make most often when they invest in other kinds of startups is they say, 'This is totally different.' And so the things that matter, like making a product that people desperately want, like talking to customers, they throw this out the window. That is a recipe for heartache and tears.

If in 1989 I said, 'I have an idea: Bottle water and sell it. And charge more than a beer,' they would have chased me around with a giant butterfly net. The same with paying to watch a television station.

Smart companies fail because they do everything right. They cater to high-profit-margin customers and ignore the low end of the market, where disruptive innovations emerge from.

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

If a man can... make a better mousetrap, the world will make a beaten path to his door.

India is a large market where our focus will be to grow faster than the market and add few percentage points to our market share every year.

It turns out that no undergrad class prepares you to start a startup - you learn most of it as you do it.

Your Dream, Vision, Purpose, and Mission all come together when you bring products to market - so make sure you're bringing your best.

I think the biggest challenge over time is that we stay creative and making sure that we continue to launch awesome products that people love.

I think the challenge for all technology companies is to modify what they're doing to be what the market needs at that point.