Imran Amed Quotes

I don't think I ever dreamt of going into business. No one in my family was in business.

Every business decision I ever made I learned from my grandfather Papa Sam. He moved here from Russia when he was a boy. He worked his way up selling newspapers and ladies' handbags, and eventually, he became Cadillac Sam, one of the biggest car dealers in Chicago.

After working for 14 years on Wall Street and growing up in a family with strong roots in small business, I know how important the entrepreneurial spirit is to attaining the American dream.

If anything, I'd say my family was entrepreneurial - my grandfather and father. It was in our blood. But I didn't have this one mentor that was super successful.

My family were all entrepreneurs, including my parents and grandparents.

My grandmother was divorced, and she had 10 children herself. She never finished high school. She started selling lace on the side of the road and then grew that into a multimillion-dollar business - a retail store selling mostly furniture and appliances.

I was never, ever interested in becoming a businessman or an entrepreneur. If I was a businessman, or saw myself as a businessman, I would have never gone into the airline business.

My mom raised me with the idea of doing public service, and I definitely want to go in that direction. But I also want to follow in my dad's entrepreneurial footsteps.

My parents were entrepreneurs. I grew up believing in the power of innovation.

My family background was heavily slanted toward business and seafaring matters.

Entrepreneurs are great at dealing with uncertainty and also very good at minimizing risk. That's the classic great entrepreneur.

I never knew anything other than wanting to be an entrepreneur. I tried my first business when I was 6 years old, and I started another business when I was 8. I don't think I knew anything besides that.

Every single thing I learned about marketing and building my business, I learned from my mom, and she had never been in the workforce. She just had great practical sense.

I never had a job. I bought my first house within a year of getting out of school, and I built a custom one four and a half years later. The Art Center didn't teach much about business, but I learned a lot from the Fortune 500 companies that were my clients.

I have always been very entrepreneurial minded. Oftentimes, while I was sitting in class listening to my professor ramble on, I would think to myself: 'I could be out there making money right now.'

There are immense numbers of potential entrepreneurs who can start their own businesses among the people who are working in large organisations.

Knowing that my ancestry had all been quite wealthy and owned their own businesses probably left me with the ambition to replicate what they'd done.

I'm not the smartest guy you've ever met, or the hardest-working. I was a mediocre student. I'm not technical at all - I can't write a word of code. What sets me apart, I think, is a tolerance for risk and an intuition about what will happen in the future. Seeing where things are headed is the essence of entrepreneurship.

A lot of people who own a business aren't entrepreneurial at all.

My father was an entrepreneur - a sign maker, and he had about 20 employees - and often he'd take me to business meetings, and I would listen to him talk with his workers and customers. We would also talk a lot about business over dinner.

I think that in the earlier days, when I was a 'wantrepreneur,' I was really doing things because I thought what I wanted was to be rich.

I am a serious businesswoman. I don't enjoy being out there on TV; it's not what I do well. But I love building companies; I love making products.

I think entrepreneurs are born and not created, and so I think you see a lot of similarities among entrepreneurs in different parts of the world. Their backdrop may be very different, but their drive to create a business and to create jobs remains very much the same, whether it's in Silicon Valley or Kandahar or Kabul.

And no again: My studio is not a first or any step toward becoming any type of businessman on my part.

When I was growing up, my father helped kindle my passion for innovation and technology. He was a high-ranking executive at AT&T and used our family dinner table as a focus group.