Ken Xie Quotes

If you're competitor-focused, you have to wait until there is a competitor doing something. Being customer-focused allows you to be more pioneering.

I am thoroughly enjoying spending the majority of my time with entrepreneurs. I find that their enthusiasm, dedication, willingness to take huge risks and desire to make a dramatic impact quite inspiring.

Like many of my fellow entrepreneurs, I didn't create Hearsay Social with my co-founder Steve Garrity because it would be fun and easy, but because we're at our best when faced with enormous challenges.

Business is about people. It's about passion. It's about bold ideas, bold small ideas or bold large ideas.

Give me an entrepreneur with a lot of courage, gusto and who iterates rapidly, and I will back that person day in and day out.

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.

As I've conducted my interviews with crowdsourcing entrepreneurs and experts, it's constantly hit me that your ability to do something big and bold is really a function of the size and quality of your crowd.

One of the things that I'm really proud of is that I have really good timing. It's very easy for me to see what's coming up and it's no coincidence that I went headfirst into wine and then headfirst into new media - none at all.

The TED Fellowship exposed me to a set of youngsters who had wilder ideas than I did - and almost all of them were pursuing their wild and crazy ideas without fear of failure.

When you look at every studio in the '20s or '30s, from Louis B. Mayer to Jack Warner, you see people who started with one plan and quickly shifted gears to adapt to a changing world. One of my favorite stories is that Walt Disney mortgaged his house to make 'Snow White.' He saw there was a real opportunity to change the world.

Entrepreneurship requires flexibility and an open society, and there will always be people who succeed and people who follow. For those who lead, they have an obligation to create a better life for the people around them.

We want people who work for us to be entrepreneurs. We like them to look at ideas. We like them to chase ideas. We like them to not be what I call a caretaker of an asset.

We picked a great marketplace. We were a pioneer in payroll processing for very small companies. And we had the perseverance and good fortune enough to stick it out.

Every time we've moved ahead in IBM, it was because someone was willing to take a chance, put his head on the block, and try something new.

When everyone is running the machine, and it's all working, there's a tendency to look at the short term and focus on incremental opportunities and not look ahead to the really big opportunities.

We started Fox when everyone said it couldn't be done.

I have been so copied by those people who have made fortunes that people assume I am that rich. But I did things for the excitement, the dare, the fact that it was new, not for the money. And too many times I was the first, not the beneficiary.

I belong to the breed of first-generation entrepreneurs who have basically created our enterprises with very frugal resources.

I can't say enough about the guts and the talents of Amazon. They're so agile, they're so nimble; they picked us up two weeks after we premiered, and their whole attitude is, 'Go, go, go, go,' so I'm very, very impressed.

Build a company that changes the way things get done!

Really, creation and innovation are part of the French DNA.

Talented people have a responsibility to get the training they need to be successful risk takers and go out there to take risks. What I see is surplus of talented people and a shortage of people willing to take the risks.

Entrepreneurship is not only about starting businesses but is an attitude to life.

If you built a successful company the first time, it's really important not to fall into the trap of resting on your laurels and doing the same thing the next time. It's stepping into the unknown that enables you to create something fresh, new, and innovative.

I think the culture and DNA of our organization is to take risks.