Kevin Systrom Quotes

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.

For the first two years of Eventbrite, all the work was done by just the three founders: me, my husband, Kevin, and our chief technology officer, Renaud Visage.

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

I'm going to go do this crazy thing. I'm going to start this company selling books online.

In 1990, Paul Smith and I decided that conducting polymers as materials had developed to a level of maturity that commercial products were possible. With this as a goal, we founded UNLAX Corporation.

So I decided to form a production company with my wife and our partner Diane.

I have a great team who has helped me build Biocon, I was very fortunate to be able to share my vision with a group of people who really were as excited about challenges as I was.

I'm an engineer turned entrepreneur who's passionate about connection.

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.

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

It was supposed to be a year or two just to refresh my batteries, but I moved to Silicon Valley in the early 90's, and one thing let to another, got very involved in high tech, and formed a company and it ended up doing pretty well.

I opened up a frozen-yogurt business out of college. I didn't finish college; I went halfway, and then I worked for Joel Silver, the producer, as a driver for a year.

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

I'm very interested in my new kitchen equipment shop. I've started it with two friends.

Pizza made me who I am. In the summer of 1998, I dropped out of college and started a pizza restaurant called Growlies in my hometown in rural Canada. My seed money: a credit card with a $20,000 limit.

My drive into high tech doesn't involve a lot of people - just me and a very small team.

I always knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I started my own software company in high school and went to college to study entrepreneurship.

I've got to let the people who are in the business run the business. I can help them think through their decisions about products, about partners, about hiring. But in the end, the decisions are theirs, and so is the responsibility.

I was lucky enough to co-found a business in college that ended up with 400 employees, and I launched 20 different projects while I was there - a project a week.

I was lucky - I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents' garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees.

When I got out of college, I gave myself till I was 30 to invent a product. If I couldn't do it by then, I would just get a real job. And that fear - the fear of a real job - motivated me to be an entrepreneur.

In getting Under Armour started, like any business, I think, number one, you need a great idea. But it's also about who you know.

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.

If I had been out in the industry instead of being a college kid who had an idea for another T-shirt, I would have been too scared to do anything.

Nurturing a project from the ground floor is something I've been wanting to do.