Walt Mossberg Quotes

I'm not the smartest guy you've ever met, or the hardest-working. I was a mediocre student. I'm not technical at all - I can't write a word of code. What sets me apart, I think, is a tolerance for risk and an intuition about what will happen in the future. Seeing where things are headed is the essence of entrepreneurship.

Great innovators like Thomas Alva Edison, Henry Ford, and Andrew Carnegie didn't rely on government. There was hardly any of it in those days. More recently, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Larry Ellison used genius to put brand-new ideas into production.

Larry Page, co-founder of Google, is an unbelievable big thinker, and there was a saying in Google that if you wanted to know the future, go to Larry.

In the movies, you want a good story and characters that are honest, but you are also looking for a good director who can lead the ship. That's how we look at business. Everybody has a great idea for a start-up, and so do their relatives, and they tell me, 'You gotta build it.' I say, 'I have to believe in it.'

Seeing the world around you clearly is a critical step in developing an idea for a business, carrying out that idea, and then thriving with an ongoing concern. Through choice, predilection, lack of education, impatience, or other causes, the entrepreneur lives, in a way, outside the mainstream.

Nobody is actually a natural C.E.O.

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.

The next Bill Gates will not start an operating system. The next Larry Page won't start a search engine. The next Mark Zuckerberg won't start a social network company. If you are copying these people, you are not learning from them.

Silicon Valley is a mindset, not a location.

I like entrepreneurial people; I like people who take risks.

Great entrepreneurs focus intensely on an opportunity where others see nothing.

One of my mentors early on was Eli Harari, the founder of SanDisk, who happened to be a friend of my dad's.

A lot of people say I was brilliant. I wasn't. I was an opportunist: a young entrepreneur who saw things and took advantage.

As an entrepreneur, you tend to see the opportunities where others see none.

I'm inspired by Walt Disney. I'm inspired by Howard Hughes. I'm inspired by Henry Ford. I'm inspired by Steve Jobs. I mean, I'm inspired by James Perse.

VCs invest in innovation and disruption, but how often do they innovate themselves?

Travis Kalanick was and is the perfect person to lead Uber, a product I knew from day one was going to be big.

Steve Jobs knows how to hold his hand out, to build beautiful products and make people pay for them.

Having a good idea is one thing, but persuading other people to buy it is quite another. Good inventors are polymaths: they think with their hands and their brains. They're experts in design, engineering and business.

Being an entrepreneur isn't really about starting a business. It's a way of looking at the world: seeing opportunity where others see obstacles, taking risks when others take refuge.

Entrepreneurship is not only a mindset but a skillset.

When [competitors are] in the shower in the morning, they're thinking about how they're going to get ahead of one of their top competitors. Here in the shower, we're thinking about how we are going to invent something on behalf of a customer.

I think leaders lead themselves, but leaders have ideas and maybe they're visionary ideas. Probably today, people would say Steve Jobs was a visionary because he invented this little gadget, the cell phone. But he didn't invent cell phones, and he didn't design the cell phone. He just took a couple of ideas and put them together, and no one else put those same ideas together as successfully as he did. But he had something that he was trying to do that intrigued him, and he could do it very well.

There isn't a plant or a business on earth that couldn't stand a few improvements-and be better for them. Someone is going to think of them. Why not beat the other fellow to it?

As far as business moguls, I'm always a fan of how Jay Z moves. He was just always very strategic ever since he came into the game.