Michael Gerber Quotes

I already have enough apparel businesses that are either doing well or not really doing anything at all, and I'm looking to broaden my portfolio.

I always tried to move up the food chain. I started with cement and then moved into textiles and banking. When I was trading sugar, I added salt and flour so that then we could do pasta. And then I thought, why not make the bag for it, too? So, we started making packaging.

Everybody starts with creating or acquiring certain property in order to create the material to work with. When we started our business, we thought first of all about development, how to grow, and we managed to do this, even with all the difficulties and all the difficult rules that were implemented in Russia at that time.

Entrepreneurs, guys that start businesses, grow with them. It's more painful than it would appear.

That's the problem with so many organizations around entrepreneurship. They're driven by metrics that don't matter.

I've said it for four decades - work 'on' your business, not just 'in' your business!

We don't want to go starting completely separate businesses that do nothing for our user base.

New products, new markets, new investors, and new ways of doing things are the lifeblood of growth. And while each innovation carries potential risk, businesses that don't innovate will eventually diminish.

As businesses grow, all sorts of things that once were done on the fly - including creating new products - have a way of becoming bureaucratized.

We need to stop defining Boeing's future based on a single program or two programs, and we have been doing that with the fighter story. It doesn't mean it was wrong or right; I just don't think it represents the great diversity of the Boeing Defense portfolio.

I didn't generate my success by being a prognosticator. I developed my reputation building our businesses by building great businesses and making them more efficient.

Once you have a product that you are happy with, you the need to centralize things to continue growth.

What interests me is starting businesses on our own, finding ideas that we can support, and simply investing in invention.

When you start a business, go for the lowest hanging fruit.

By getting into distribution and production, I am actually widening my base.

In the first three years of Mint, from when it was founded to when it was sold, I can honestly say that in a sustainable way, I couldn't have worked any harder on it.

Once you start a business, you have to grow it and grow with it - starting a business is not just for Christmas.

If you don't drive your business, you will be driven out of business.

As an entrepreneur, in many ways it's like looking into the crystal ball for what my company will hopefully go through as it starts to think about bigger challenges - scaling internationally, getting ready to go public, and all those different things.

When you've got a great business going, you go open another and take the risk of losing the whole thing. It's fun!

Some people are serial entrepreneurs and want to just move on to the next thing. They just want to clean the slate and start from scratch. I feel that sometimes, too, and the way that we do that here is we build things inside Shutterstock: we launch new products all the time.

In the U.S., we didn't have scale, and without scale, it's difficult to operate.

The grim reality is that most start-ups fail. Most new products are not successful. Yet the story of perseverance, creative genius, and hard work persists.

To turn really interesting ideas and fledgling technologies into a company that can continue to innovate for years, it requires a lot of disciplines.

For small businesses trying to figure out how to get big, I would say you are going to have to take some risks. And I think that is what shuts off most people. They are not willing take the risk.