Daniel Lyons Quotes

Basically, I left Northern Telecom after 7.5 years of being in one company after school. And then, I ended up in a series of start-ups. The first of those was a company called Sitech, and they were in local area networks.

I had to quit a 'real job' to start my first company.

There are plenty of things I wish I'd known when I decided to quit my position at IBM and work on the idea that later became TaskRabbit. Maybe that's why one of the things I cherish most about being a founder and CEO is the opportunity to offer advice to new entrepreneurs.

Very ambitious startups often take a long time to work - or sometimes they take a very long time to look ambitious.

I was an investor doing well and decided to be an entrepreneur.

I left Google after four years of working on Google Maps, search, and Google TV as a product marketing manager. I knew I wanted to do something on my own.

When I started my first company, I still had a 40-hour a week job. I was working on my company on nights and weekends before I took the plunge and gave up a salary.

I love working with really early stage startups where the outcome is still in doubt. Maybe they'll go on to greatness, or maybe they'll never get off the runway at all.

Sometimes people think Y Combinator has big ideas about themes. But really, we just fund the best startups.

Here in Silicon Valley, I have taken part in hundreds of conversations trying to convince people to dive in and become entrepreneurs. All too often, innovators with good, safe, jobs are unwilling to put their family's access to health care at risk by walking away from company-backed medical insurance.

I actually made a website called Y2 Combinator, which was the Y Combinator that starts Y Combinator clones. There's a very clear difference in the quality between the companies that come from YC and the companies that don't.

I left halfway through my third year to start Lipstick On Your Collar, which was the first thing I ever did.

Ask any venture capitalist, and they will tell you that they consider the experience and completeness of the founding team to be a more important factor in their investment decision than the technology that is being built.

I've been an employee all my life. Would I wish, if I could rewind it, to have gone down a different route? Possibly, but I've had a great time. Anyway I'm not ruling it out; I could still buy a business.

If you're going to quit your job to focus on an idea, you get overly attached to that idea because you had it, and it's the reason you quit your job. Plus, most ideas are bad.

Startups, in some sense, have gotten so easy to start that we are confusing two things. And what we are confusing, often, is, 'How far can you get in your first day of travel?' with, 'How long it is going to take to get up to the top of the mountain?'

I'm just riding this train as long as I can. As long as I'm having fun, I'll do it. When it stops being fun, I'll try something else. Maybe I'll open up a chain of Popeye's Chicken.

It's hard to tell with these Internet startups if they're really interested in building companies or if they're just interested in the money. I can tell you, though: If they don't really want to build a company, they won't luck into it. That's because it's so hard that if you don't have a passion, you'll give up.

A hardware startup with a lot of funding and a lot of momentum has a lot less risk.

Look at MIT—the smartest people in the world. They start up 50 companies a year. Only 1 makes it.

Growing up in Silicon Valley, during my time at Morgan Stanley and as a member of Stanford's Board, I've had the opportunity to experience firsthand how tech companies can help people in their daily lives.

I think that I am lucky and blessed to have the job that I have, and I am trying to create longevity. If that means that I transition into different things at different points in my life, then that's fine. I also believe that if doors don't open, make new doors, so I've also started producing quite a bit of things.

I played with different words like 'home run,' 'megahit,' and they just all sounded kind of 'blah.' So I put in 'unicorn' because they are - these are very rare companies in the sense that there are thousands of startups in tech every year, and only a handful will wind up becoming a unicorn company. They're really rare.

I have seen a lot of now-great companies at their earliest stages, and these early-stage startups are not built by the senior people who know how to run and scale big-company machines.

While 'The Owner's Manual' is not a formula for guaranteed success by any means, we're confident it will help reduce the failure rate of most startups that use our Customer Development process.