Wendy Kopp Quotes

The common question that gets asked in business is, 'why?' That's a good question, but an equally valid question is, 'why not?'

Experience hobbles progress and leads to abandonment of difficult problems; it encourages the initiated to walk on the shady side of the street in the direction of experiences that have been pleasant. Youth without experience attacks the unsolved problems which maturer age with experience avoids, and from the labors of youth comes progress. Youth has dreams and visions, and will not be denied.

Being an artist isn't a genetic disposition or a specific talent. It's an attitude we can all adopt. It's a hunger to seize new ground, make connections, and work without a map. If you do those things, you're an artist.

Truly novel inventions emerge only in one's youth. Later one becomes ever more experienced, famous-and foolish.

From the first days of my career as an entrepreneur, I have always used my own and my team's lack of experience to our advantage. In fact, at our first venture, Student magazine, we used our newcomer status to secure great interviews and generate publicity - people were excited about our new project and wanted to get involved. Our inexperience fed our restless enthusiasm for trying new things, which became part of our core mission.

I know the rewards of focusing on innovation and outcomes as opposed to hours. I've been fortunate to work with brilliant entrepreneurs who didn't have years of experience, and yet they changed the world.

Part of the beauty of Silicon Valley is that people generally encourage you to think crazy. It's the hypothesis that there's nothing sacred that can't be changed.

It always helps to have someone who can say, No, we can do it faster this way, or We have to break the rules, even our own rules, to get things done.

With my writing, I try to do stuff I have not done before. Each time I sit down, I want to have a new experience, and by extension, I want my readers to have a different experience.

You may or may not like 'Baaz.' But you will definitely say I have done something different.

I think it's been obvious from the beginning that my projects are not going to be something that people already have in mind. You can't be thinking about such things when you create something.

The idea that I'm 45 doesn't mean that I have no creativity. I'm like a student: it's the same - it's not a war!

A+E has always looked in places where others didn't want to look. There's a service in that.

I've done that my whole life - I've taken the way people think and turned it on its head.

You may confuse a lot of people when going against the grain of conventional thinking, and that's perfectly okay. As an entrepreneur, standing up for your vision to your family and friends might possibly be the best practice you will get for the life that awaits you.

Business people want things to be safe but that's rubbish to me. In music nothing should be safe.

We were pushing the boundaries a bit of Saturday morning telly and trying new things.

Bringing in innovation and youth is not a bad thing: it is a courageous choice.

We do things differently. You don't have to worry about being part of a particular genre. You just go for it.

I've always tried to do things a little bit before they were being done by the mainstream. I challenge myself to do that in stand-up also, to talk about things that I'm not hearing anybody talk about onstage and in the media.

Before you can think out of the box, you have to start with a box

When trouble arises and things look bad, there is always one individual who perceives a solution and is willing to take command. Very often, that individual is crazy.

Sometimes it takes a long time for a picture to incubate. And every time I do that, the rewards are so much bigger than what I would have gotten if I had only done the same as I always do. So each time I make an effort and I get out of a lazy routine, it's amazing how big the reward can be. It's listening to those little ideas knocking on the door in your mind.

Sometimes I think you have to try to do things that people don't think are doable. I remember at the very beginning actually, the first person I had to convince was myself really because there's a self-censorship. When everybody says 'we don't do silent movies anymore,' you agree with everybody, and you say 'yeah, you're right.' It was a fantasy.

Be creative. Use unconventional thinking. And have the guts to carry it out.