Alan J. Heeger Quotes

Like many of my fellow entrepreneurs, I didn't create Hearsay Social with my co-founder Steve Garrity because it would be fun and easy, but because we're at our best when faced with enormous challenges.

In high school, I started my first company, called M Cubed Software. We named it that because it was me and two other guys named Mike.

When you start a company, it's more an art than a science because it's totally unknown. Instead of solving high-profile problems, try to solve something that's deeply personal to you. Ideally, if you're an ordinary person and you've just solved your problem, you might have solved the problem for millions of people.

I've been an entrepreneur since I was 18. I started a company with a bunch of buddies that got funded in my senior year, and that's when I finished school. It was called Scour, a peer-to-peer service, file-sharing.

Mike Krieger and I started talking, and he decided he liked the idea of helping start the company. Once he joined, we took a step back and looked at the product as it stood.

Starting a company is like throwing yourself off the cliff and assembling an airplane on the way down.

Entrepreneurs' willingness to innovate or just to invest - and thus create new jobs - is driven by their 'animal spirits,' as they decide whether to leap into the void.

As I've conducted my interviews with crowdsourcing entrepreneurs and experts, it's constantly hit me that your ability to do something big and bold is really a function of the size and quality of your crowd.

Properly defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future.

As an entrepreneur you keep trying things, and I try everything. I try business ideas, on our website we test everything, iterate, iterate, iterate.

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.

In 1983, I set up Caxton Corp. It's been an interesting and happy ride since.

Entrepreneurs are risk takers, willing to roll the dice with their money or reputation on the line in support of an idea or enterprise. They willingly assume responsibility for the success or failure of a venture and are answerable for all its facets.

Google worries - and rightly so - about how hard it is for a big company to come up with the next hot thing.

Running a real business is exacting, daunting, repetitive work. Even in Silicon Valley.

My co-founder Dylan Smith and I left our junior year of college to move to the Bay Area. To the horror of our friends' parents, we actually had two other friends drop out of college to work on the product. The four of us were just working non-stop growing Box.

I was reluctant to start the company that would become Lytro, primarily due to my academic background.

The culmination of all of that was the decision to start a company, which became Lotus, to do a product, which became 1-2-3. By the time I reached that point it had been four years, and it felt like a lifetime, but really it was kind of evolutionary.

If you have a startup that's keeping it up at night because you think it's so great, then you should do that.

New industries are created by entrepreneurs who don't necessarily have subject matter expertise when they get started, yet they are still responsible for most of the innovation we see in society.

So March 2010, we launched Pinterest, and we were at 3,000 accounts. And that wouldn't be so bad if we hadn't started building Pinterest actually in November 2009. And that alone wouldn't have been so bad if I hadn't left my job to start a company in May 2008.

For decades, technology entrepreneurship has been revered, and people like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk were heroes.

Innovation is so hard and so frustrating; it takes the intersections of people with courage, vision, and resources.

If you go to business school, and you put a product out there in the world, and it's working, the logic is to keep putting the same product out there. And I think that really bumps up against the creative process - and moviemaking, generally. And I think that our company really pushes against that.

Entrepreneurship is the key to emerging technologies.