Patrick Collison Quotes

I started my first company when I was in my college dorm as a senior with two of my really good friends. We started a company that became SparkNotes.com. You know CliffsNotes? SparkNotes is a modern-day version of that.

In 1990, Paul Smith and I decided that conducting polymers as materials had developed to a level of maturity that commercial products were possible. With this as a goal, we founded UNLAX Corporation.

I'm an engineer turned entrepreneur who's passionate about connection.

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

Cofounders will endure so much together that their relationship is often compared to a marriage.

1976, I was all of 18, and when I stepped into the world of business, the capital I had in my hand was 20,000 rupees.

I always knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I started my own software company in high school and went to college to study entrepreneurship.

The entrepreneurial bug had already bitten my son Ankur by the time he got to college. As a lifelong entrepreneur, I certainly didn't want to dampen his enthusiasm by telling him he couldn't do it, but I also wanted to make sure it was balanced with the proper attention to his studies.

For the first two years of Eventbrite, all the work was done by just the three founders: me, my husband, Kevin, and our chief technology officer, Renaud Visage.

Entrepreneurship is, in large part, about building something from nothing, which means creating a cause.

We can support innovators and entrepreneurs.

Our third partner [with Neal Dodson] was this other guy called Corey [Moosa], and he came in with good ideas and also some access to money, and so we joined forces and drew up a business plan and got financing for the beginnings of the company. We had no idea what we were doing really. We just started looking through material and started producing our own stuff.

If you're not in college and you don't know a cofounder, the next best thing I think is to go work at an interesting company.

There are a few other things that I built when I was at Harvard that were kind of smaller versions of Facebook.

The college kids should think hard about what they're doing. If you have a great idea for a company, there's no right time to start it, and it's often better to start it sooner rather than later. I went to Stanford undergrad and Stanford Law School, and if I had to do it over again, I might still do those things, but I wish I had asked the type of questions like, why I was doing it, was it just for the status and prestige, or was it because I was really interested in the substance of it.

My best entrepreneurial advice is to start.

If you want to get rich with a tax free enterprise that sells nothing, start a church.

Entrepreneur is someone who has a vision for something and a want to create.

Entrepreneurship is neither a science nor an art. It is a practice.

No matter what you choose, build stuff and be around smart people.

Entrepreneurialism is supposed to be fun!

You need this sort of a tailwind to make a startup successful.

I've had many challenges - every entrepreneur does - it's the nature of the beast.

LEARN FROM FAILURE. If you are an entrepreneur and your first venture wasn't a success, welcome to the club.

In the 1980s, I was working to reform the schools in Arkansas. Donald Trump was borrowing $14 million from his father to start his businesses. In the 1990s, I went to Beijing and I said women's rights are human rights. He insulted a former Miss Universe, Alicia Machado, called her an eating machine.