Ryan Holmes 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.

I think economics is about passion. Economic progress, whether it is a two-person coffee shop or whether it is Netscape, is about people with brave ideas. Because it is brave to mortgage the house, when you've got two kids, to start a coffee shop.

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.

So we went to Atari and said, 'Hey, we've got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we'll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we'll come work for you.' And they said, 'No.' So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, 'Hey, we don't need you. You haven't got through college yet.'

When I left my job at Lehman Brothers to start a company, my best friend's mother said, 'How could you leave a sure thing like Lehman to do a silly carpool startup?' That was three months before Lehman went bankrupt.

The only rollercoasters I get on are startups.

If you want swashbuckling action in your life, become an entrepreneur and give it a go.

Going into business for yourself, becoming an entrepreneur, is the modern-day equivalent of pioneering on the old frontier.

Starting a business is like jumping out of an airplane without a parachute. In mid air, the entrepreneur begins building a parachute and hopes it opens before hitting the ground.

Entrepreneurship is having an idea to do something great and not entirely have a plan on how to do it but the drive and will power to make it work

If you're looking to become an entrepreneur then don't waste your time going to university or business school - just get on and do it.

When I was starting out, being a young entrepreneur was not fashionable. Parents would ask, 'When are you going to get a real job?'

The most important job of an entrepreneur is to design the business before there is a business.

Entrepreneurs need to start building today. The barrier to entry in tech is low, so start designing, start coding it, launch it, build prototypes, build a working version of it. The Internet has amazing powers of distribution. You can test your ideas. You can see if it works, if it doesn't work, whether it's fun, and whether you're sufficiently motivated. People who go into entrepreneurship to get rich aren't going to be happy. It’s the building of things that makes you happy. You have to enjoy the process whether you succeed or fail.

A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.

I had no plans to be an entrepreneur. I just wanted to be a journalist and write for a magazine. At 15, I just decided to leave school and launch a national student magazine.

Launching a business is essentially an adventure in problem-solving.

When I was 15, I left school to start a magazine, and it became a success because I wouldn't take no for an answer. I remember banging on James Baldwin's door to ask for an interview when he came to England. Then I got Jean-Paul Sartre's home phone number and asked him to contribute. If I'd been 30, he might have said no, but I was a 15-year-old with passion and he was charmed. Making money was always just a side product of having a good time and creating things nobody'd seen before.

A startup is the largest endeavor over which you can have definite mastery. You can have agency not just over your own life, but over a small and important part of the world. It begins by rejecting the unjust tyranny of Chance. You are not a lottery ticket.

Each venture Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feeling.

What is an entrepreneur? Someone who jumps off a cliff and builds a plane on the way down.

In a startup, both the problem and solution are unknown.

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.

What Steve Jobs and I did-and at the same time Bill Gates and Paul Allen did-we had no savings accounts, no friends that could loan us money. But we had ideas, and I wanted all my life to be a part of a revolution.

You can't study to be an entrepreneur. Sometimes, you just have to jump.