Vivek Wadhwa Quotes

Entrepreneurship works on the apprenticeship model. The best way to learn how to be an entrepreneur is to start a company and seek the advice of a successful entrepreneur in the area in which you are interested. Or work at a startup for a few years to learn the ropes.

Very ambitious startups often take a long time to work - or sometimes they take a very long time to look ambitious.

So many of my rookie mistakes could have been avoided by first-hand exposure to other, more experienced technology entrepreneurs.

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.

While 'The Owner's Manual' is not a formula for guaranteed success by any means, we're confident it will help reduce the failure rate of most startups that use our Customer Development process.

When I started Go Daddy, I tried many things - like building networks and selling education - and none of it panned out. I lost millions of dollars the first couple of years. I made a lot of wrong turns, but that's the process of being successful in business.

Look at MIT—the smartest people in the world. They start up 50 companies a year. Only 1 makes it.

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

What would I advise an aspiring young entrepreneur? Certainly I'd say read the works of great entrepreneurs and investors like Ben Horowitz, Peter Thiel, and many others. But what's more important is to get real experience at a great startup.

The best entrepreneurs know when to ignore sage advice.

Start-up success is not a consequence of good genes or being in the right place at the right time. Success can be engineered by following the right process, which means it can be learned, which means it can be taught.

I always knew I wanted to start my own line. Nights and weekends, I would work on my business plan.

If you look at most successful startups, they're run by people in their mid to late forties, who've gone through the trenches multiple times and had multiple failures, so they understand.

We want Facebook to be one of the best places people can go to learn how to build stuff. If you want to build a company, nothing better than jumping in and trying to build one. But Facebook is also great for entrepreneurs/hackers. If people want to come for a few years and move on and build something great, that's something we're proud of.

Well, I think that there's a very thin dividing line between success and failure. And I think if you start a business without financial backing, you're likely to go the wrong side of that dividing line.

When you're a young talent, and you want to launch your brand, you always have tons of questions: Where should I produce? Should I launch a second line? Should I do shoes, accessories? If you have someone who can coach you and give you advice and help you find the right supplier, it's a big help.

As an entrepreneur, you never stop learning.

If you have a fantastic idea you're really passionate about and are making $100,000 in your job, if you can set aside some of that to invest in servers or contractors or other folks, that's actually the best way to start a business in my opinion.

Small businesses, you can give them capital, but what they often need as much is mentoring, advice and help with their business plan.

You need to invent things and you need to get them to people. You need to commercialize those inventions. Obviously, the best way we've come up with doing that is through companies.

The best way we can encourage people to create companies that create jobs is to celebrate the diverse entrepreneurial stories and the variety of drivers that led these entrepreneurs to sticking their necks out.

From the time I was a kid, I was always interested in any and all kinds of new business ideas.

I can't understand the conditions of a corporate product being designed and getting millions. I admire it, it's great, but I don't know how to do that. I have to have the wheel.

Sometimes people think Y Combinator has big ideas about themes. But really, we just fund the best startups.

Recessions are the best time to start a company. Companies fail. Others hold back capital. If you are willing to do the preparation and work, it is the best time to invest in yourself and start a business.