Jon Oringer Quotes

A savvy entrepreneur will not always look for investment money, first.

Many businesses fail because the owner wasn't willing to invest and wasn't educated on the difference between spending money frivolously and investing money into the business for growth, and the risks and rewards of that cash infusion.

There's nothing wrong with raising venture capital. Many lean startups are ambitious and are able to deploy large amounts of capital. What differentiates them is their disciplined approach to determining when to spend money: after the fundamental elements of the business model have been empirically validated.

Small businesses have told us that having cash in their pocket is one of the primary things that they need.

One thing I'm so grateful for is sidestepping the usual venture capital, private equity route. My friends who have gone that way are many times beholden to their boards of directors, to 'sell' ideas to a team.

The right algorithm is to put off seeking funds for as long as physically possible. And in an ideal world, a startup would never have to seek funds at all.

I already have enough apparel businesses that are either doing well or not really doing anything at all, and I'm looking to broaden my portfolio.

You have to manage money. Particularly with market economies. You may have a great product, but if your bottom line goes bust, then that's it.

When I first got into business, I made a lot of bad decisions.

When you're talking about capital and financial things, which I certainly pay a lot of attention to, I base those decisions on one question that I typically ask myself, which is 'Does it help us to build a better company?'

Overhead will eat you alive if not constantly viewed as a parasite to be exterminated. Never mind the bleating of those you employ. Hold out until mutiny is imminent before employing even a single additional member of staff. More startups are wrecked by overstaffing than by any other cause, bar failure to monitor cash flow.

I'm not saying M.B.A.s can't be great entrepreneurs. They can. But you don't need a degree to figure out it's costing you $5,000 per month to run your business, so you need $30,000 to keep it going for six more months.

You can make great money in a utility type of business by borrowing cheaply and lending sensibly but that's not what's being done.

With the world changing fast, we needed capital for investments. There's only so much bandwidth in your own balance sheet.

I decided that the stock market was not an option for IKEA. I knew that only a long-term perspective could secure our growth plans, and I didn't want IKEA to become dependent on financial institutions.

When the venture industry started, it was enough to just have money and then it was enough to sort of have this big fuzzy brand. But now startups are getting a lot smarter.

I know how to finance something. It's easier today because, as you're more successful, everybody wants to do deals with you. But even in the beginning, when I took Landry's public, I owned 100 percent of it. I never had investors or anything. I was just always able to find a way to do it.

What I like to say when you get into something that feels like a bubble or, at least, feels irrational is that you still want to build a company that has a strong discipline, business-building culture.

Unlike a normal venture fund, we never stop raising capital. We can always absorb new capital on the platform and into the next deal as long as we feel it won't distort the allocation and the pricing.

Most entrepreneurs come up with a product, or they come up with an idea and they think they can be successful with it. But if they don't know the financial side of their business and understand credit and working capital and what it takes money-wise, you can't be successful. The product is just a product.

The economics of setting up a new restaurant are scary in good times and terrifying in bad ones.

Startups should be - if you graph their financial performance, it should be what's called a J curve. You start out at zero. you're not making any money; you're not losing any money.

The problem for new businesses isn't corporate taxes. Anyone who has actually started a new business knows you don't make enough money for years to pay any meaningful tax on it.

The first thing you need in order to make a business viable is to preserve a cash flow. I made sure I didn't have any financial backing or support.

I think a lot of entrepreneurs think they need money to build the business faster when they actually haven't figured out the business equation yet.