Richard Branson Quotes

I'm a school dropout. So, at the age of 16, I moved to Mumbai to try my luck on some business.

I opened up a frozen-yogurt business out of college. I didn't finish college; I went halfway, and then I worked for Joel Silver, the producer, as a driver for a year.

When I got out of college, I gave myself till I was 30 to invent a product. If I couldn't do it by then, I would just get a real job. And that fear - the fear of a real job - motivated me to be an entrepreneur.

I started my clothing brand when I was 18.

When I was 15, I left school to start a magazine, and it became a success because I wouldn't take no for an answer. I remember banging on James Baldwin's door to ask for an interview when he came to England. Then I got Jean-Paul Sartre's home phone number and asked him to contribute. If I'd been 30, he might have said no, but I was a 15-year-old with passion and he was charmed. Making money was always just a side product of having a good time and creating things nobody'd seen before.

If you're looking to become an entrepreneur then don't waste your time going to university or business school - just get on and do it.

I wanted to be an editor or a journalist, I wasn't really interested in being an entrepreneur, but I soon found I had to become an entrepreneur in order to keep my magazine going.

When I started my first company, I still had a 40-hour a week job. I was working on my company on nights and weekends before I took the plunge and gave up a salary.

I'm an entrepreneur. I'm married to an entrepreneur. So I haven't just sipped the entrepreneurship cool-aid, I bleed this stuff.

I didn't want to go to college - I was bored by junior high. So I was in church one day, staring at the stained glass windows and thinking about things, when suddenly I decided that if I could start selling cartoons to magazines, they'd let me quit high school.

But even writing the column for the 'Telegraph,' that idea of working to deadlines, which as an actor that's not something you have to do in the same way. It's excited me into wanting to do a bit more.

The biggest barrier to starting a company isn't ideas, funding or experience. It's excuses.

My first real venture was a paintball company I started in Grade 10, when I was 16. After hearing about it from a friend, I realized my town didn't have a playing field. I did some research, spoke with other paintball company owners, and I started my own field the following summer.

Believe it or not, the first spark for everything I've done today came down to me meeting one person in college who changed my life. A student named Anthony Adams who lived across the hall from me in our freshman dorm showed me what it meant to be an 'entrepreneur' when I saw him launch his own start-up company.

So we went to Atari and said, 'Hey, we've got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we'll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we'll come work for you.' And they said, 'No.' So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, 'Hey, we don't need you. You haven't got through college yet.'

I started Softbank in 1981, a year and a half after I came back from the United States, after graduating from Berkeley. I wanted to start my own company when I came back to Japan.

If you asked would I have done a startup in India, the answer is yes.

My sister and I had a lemonade stand - with a two-drink minimum.

Being an entrepreneur means being a creative businessperson.

It was a June day when I began my career as a national journalist. I stepped into the Detroit Bureau of the 'Wall Street Journal' and started on what would be a long, varied, rewarding career. I was 23 years old, and the year was 1970.

I worked flipping cheeseburgers and Big Mac's at McDonald's, purchased a microphone, and cleared all the stuff out of my basement and started making music.

Before I started WeWork, I owned a baby clothing company based in Dumbo, Brooklyn.

After my first ad, I was flooded with offers, which I took up. Soon, I decided that it could be a lucrative business with a parallel college life.

Graduating business school, I had $150,000 of debt. An investment firm offered me a steady job, but it didn't feel right. It was 2007 in Silicon Valley, and I dreamed of starting an Internet company.

I had to quit a 'real job' to start my first company.