Xavier Niel Quotes

I want something completely new and different to happen, and lots of it. Stuff that makes us change the way we think about a market or the world. Something that inspires a new generation of crazy startups doing crazy things.

A lot of technologies in the world were unusual in the beginning, and became standard. That's the beauty of bottom-up entrepreneurship and innovations.

Science is the first expression of punk, because it doesn't advance without challenging authority. It doesn't make progress without tearing down what was there before and building upon the structure.

Remember: you cannot build a better mouse trap by fixing the old one - NewCo demands active ownership, and that activity is not the sum of doing multiple jobs but, instead, the sum of implementing paradigm-shifting changes that create new industries and solutions.

Over the last 20 years, I've worked on or invested in many companies that scaled to 100 million users or more. But here's the thing: You don't start with 100 million users. You start with a few. So, stop thinking big, and start thinking small.

Build a company that changes the way things get done!

Shun the incremental and go for the leap.

We want to challenge the established ideas with new ideas.

Think different in order to change the rules. By definition, if you don't change the rules you aren't a revolutionary, and if you don't think different, you won't change the rules.

To escape the curse of commoditization, a company has to be a game-changer, and that requires employees who are proactive, inventive and zealous.

Disruption is a critical element of the evolution of technology - from the positive and negative aspects of disruption a typical pattern emerges, as new technologies come to market and subsequently take hold.

When Henry Ford made cheap, reliable cars people said, 'Nah, what's wrong with a horse?' That was a huge bet he made, and it worked.

Disruptive innovation is competitive strategy for an age seized by terror.

Fact is, inventing an innovative business model is often mostly a matter of serendipity.

Real progress in understanding nature is rarely incremental. All important advances are sudden intuitions, new principles, new ways of seeing.

You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness.

Changes do occur often with such suddenness in ways not foreseen except by isolated thinkers far removed from the consensus of their day.

I think Uber is just very different; there's no model to copy. It may be the reason why we've been a lightning rod in so many ways, because we don't do anything conventional... And then I think also, as an entrepreneur, I'm a bit of a lone wolf.

New industries are created by entrepreneurs who don't necessarily have subject matter expertise when they get started, yet they are still responsible for most of the innovation we see in society.

This is the age of disruption.

Think big; think disruptive. Execute with full passion.

There's a reason why start-ups, especially disruptive start-ups - like Google or Amazon or Uber - are full of young people. That's because young people are not as wedded to the old fashioned ways of doing things.

Elon Musk is an incredibly prolific entrepreneur, having come up with, or been at the founding team of Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity, PayPal, all different industries that seem to have nothing to do with each other.

Those who ultimately shake up an industry are often outsiders who don't know any better.

I just want to change the game.