Stelios Haji-Ioannou Quotes

No matter how much Bill Gates may claim otherwise, he missed the Internet, like a barreling freight train that he didn't hear or see coming.

Every company that made computers when we started the Mac, they're all gone.

We love serious technology innovations, and there is a strong bias towards large technology innovations that are sort of disruptive to the current market.

People tend to pay too little attention to history - the history of Silicon Valley and American business - and think they're the first people to come across a problem.

It's worth noting that everything - from the Internet to electric cars, genomic sequencing, mobile apps, and social media - were pioneered by startups, not existing companies.

Too many start up business fail simply because their owners continue to think and act like employees.

What does the name Virgin mean? We are a company that likes to take on the giants. In too many businesses, these giants have had things their own way. We are going to have fun competing with them.

I can help someone grow their business 130% in 12 to 18 months only because I've done that with so many of my own and have faced so many challenges.

I think you should do in life what you think you'll make a real difference at. And generally, as a businessperson, you do things you don't really have experience in.

America has its roots in a tradition of risk-taking pioneers. In more conservative Europe, if you fail in business or actually end up going to jail for it, you're finished as a businessman for good.

The benefit to building a startup is that customers don't have the same kind of friction when they adopt new technology.

As a matter of fact, capitalist economy is not and cannot be stationary. Nor is it merely expanding in a steady manner. It is incessantly being revolutionized from within by new enterprise, i.e., by the intrusion of new commodities or new methods of production or new commercial opportunities into the industrial structure as it exists at any moment.

Entrepreneurship is neither a science nor an art. It is a practice.

Startups are transforming our society. Over the past 100 years, we've gone from an industrial era, where a hierarchical structure dominated business and society, to a post information era where the network is rapidly disrupting the hierarchy and transforming the way we work and live.

When we got Tesla going at the very beginning, if you asked me what I thought the odds of success were, I would have said less than 50%. I would have said that failure is the most likely outcome.

I didn't know how to run a business. I was a terrible gallerist, the worst in history, possibly.

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.

If you look now, more than ever new entrants, new upstarts, are able to grow so much faster than they could before.

The strategic stimulus to economic development in Schumpeter's analysis is innovation, defined as the commercial or industrial application of something new---a new product, process or method of production, a new market or source of supply, a new form of commercial, business or financial organization.

The problem with most failing businesses is not that their owners don?t know enough about finance, marketing, management, and operations - they don?t, but those things are easy enough to learn - but that they spend their time and energy defending what they think they know. My experience has shown me that the people who are exceptionally good in business aren?t so because of what they know but because of their insatiable need to know more.

I've had many challenges - every entrepreneur does - it's the nature of the beast.

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

All economic activity is by definition "high risk." And defending yesterday--that is, not innovating--is far more risky than making tomorrow.

Even if you have no interest in starting a company, having the experience of having ideas and doing them, that's muscle to exercise because that's what people are going to want to see. That's what makes you different.