Richard Branson Quotes

I wanted to be my own boss. I was fascinated by airlines and how I could change travel for the average person. Then I wanted to diversify.

So I've seen life as one long learning process. And if I see - you know, if I fly on somebody else's airline and find the experience is not a pleasant one, which it wasn't in - 21 years ago, then I'd think, well, you know, maybe I can create the kind of airline that I'd like to fly on.

I think there's a need for somewhat of a mindset change. We need to have a consistent external focus. We've always had the research labs. We've always had the resources to be innovative, and we've been innovative in a number of businesses. But, in any big company, you have to constantly push people to look at markets and customers, rather than look internally at themselves.

You need to spend all of your time and energy on creating something that actually brings value to the people you're asking for money!

The closest I came to doing anything that I wanted to do was to try and check and see what industries were just starting out. There was plastics and television, and I figured television had to be more fun than plastics.

Successful entrepreneurs don't wait for the perfect moment - they create it

So much of starting a business or affecting change is the confidence and courage to simply try.

When you make a company, you make a utopia. It's where you design your perfect world.

Every year I try to pitch a show, and I try to do something outside of YouTube, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

People think innovation is just having a good idea but a lot of it is just moving quickly and trying a lot of things.

I made so many mistakes in running the company so far, basically any mistake you can think of I probably made. I think, if anything, the Facebook story is a great example of how if you're building a product that people love you can make a lot of mistakes

To create a new business that makes money, and more significantly, employs others, and more significantly, gives a product to a customer that improves their life, is our greatest challenge, our greatest opportunity, and the greatest gift, far greater than any charity that we can give our fellow person.

And ever since then [I] have set up businesses basically out of frustration. I mean, I set up Virgin Atlantic with one second-hand 747 because I hated the experience of flying on other people's airlines. And I thought, you know, I could try to create the kind of airline that I'd like to fly on. And people liked it.

I made clothes because I was looking for something that didn't exist. I had to try to create my own world.

With a wonderful business, you can figure out what will happen; you can't figure out when it will happen. You don't want to focus on when, you want to focus on what. If you're right about what, you don't have to worry about when

I'm always moving forward creatively and don't like stalling, trying to find the perfect snare drum sound.

If you're not trying to do something better, then you're not focused on the customer and you'll miss the possibility of making your business great.

I find out what the world needs. Then I go ahead and try to invent it

Why now, why is this the perfect time for this particular idea, and to start this particular company?

All good businesses are personal. The best businesses are very personal.

If Edison was worried about his candle customers, he would have never invented the light bulb.

Founders: there is no shame in failing, take pride in that you have the guts to try something new.

One of the great and terrible things about starting a start up is that you get no credit for trying.

The federal government said today they've begun training sessions for airport security workers to provide what they call more customer satisfaction to the travels, they want to make it easier for us. They're instructing security guards to glance at your luggage tags so that they can call you by your first name. Isn't that creepy? The guy touching your wife, calling her by her first name.

Research is an organized method of trying to find out what you are going to do after you cannot do what you are doing now. It may also be said to be the method of keeping a customer reasonably dissatisfied with what he has. That means constant improvement and change so that the customer will be stimulated to desire the new product enough to buy it to replace the one he has.