Lawrence M. Krauss Quotes

The time to go into a new business is when it’s badly run by others.

Swim upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom. If everybody else is doing it one way, there's a good chance you can find your niche by going in exactly the opposite direction. But be prepared for a lot of folks to wave you down and tell you you're headed the wrong way. I guess in all my years, what I heard more often than anything was: a town of less than 50,000 population cannot support a discount store for very long.

America demands invention and innovation to succeed.

The most successful businessman is the man who holds onto the old just as long as it is good, and grabs the new just as soon as it is better.

I've been fortunate to come on places where the question isn't why did I do it? The question to me is always, why didn't anybody else do it before me? Those are the ones that I scratch my head about.

I tend to not discriminate when it comes to people I can learn from. Basically, if someone has built a meaningful business in software, technology or media, faced disruption and adversity, and overcame underdog status, I want to know how they did it.

Fact is, inventing an innovative business model is often mostly a matter of serendipity.

I look at every business and ask, How long can this last? How can I identify the status quo and change it?

Part of the challenge of being an entrepreneur, if you're going for a really huge opportunity, is trying to find problems that aren't quite on the radar yet and try to solve those.

When we started Skype, if you look at analyst reports, no one forecasted it as a big business. Also when Google started, it was not fashionable to be in search. It's not trying to do the obvious - that's the hard part.

I've never been one who enjoys maintaining the status quo. I'm always pushing for new ideas, whether it's in business or philanthropy.

If you only do things where you know the answer in advance, your company goes away.

The successful man is the one who finds out what is the matter with his business before his competitors do.

My desire to participate in the business is not to make more crap.

Most entrepreneurial ideas will sound crazy, stupid and uneconomic, and then they'll turn out to be right.

You have to be willing to risk things; otherwise, somebody else will put you out of business.

I believe in being an innovator.

Where the rules of the road are not there, then there’s a tremendous amount of opportunity for entrepreneurs to bring in their innovation and their different way of thinking.

With Virgin, I've just loved creating things. And as a private company, I can get away with moving Virgin from records to airlines to train companies to space companies to whatever, without ever having to worry about analysts knocking the value of my stock.

Innovation happens everywhere.

I don't invest in ideas because ideas are a dime a dozen. I could steal the idea pretty quickly.

Pioneering companies always try out new things and experiment with new concepts and new things.

If you're doing business, not that simple to only buy. You have to create something. You have to create something that never exist for the future.

We, as a company, take the most risks in pushing the boundaries on consumer expectations.

I want to create new value by doing something people haven't done before.