Ken Olsen Quotes

Business fascinates me. It's very creative.

Britain is famous for being great at inventing and poor at commercializing.

I always knew I wanted to start my own line. Nights and weekends, I would work on my business plan.

An exit is only a success if you set an exit as your primary goal. My primary goal was to build a globally influential tool, to build something from the ground up that could literally change how we communicated in business and individually.

I consider myself an inventor first and an entrepreneur second. In real life, my hero is Thomas Edison. He was a great inventor, but also an outstanding entrepreneur who was able to sell his inventions to the masses. He didn't just develop the light bulb; he invented the entire electric grid and power distribution system.

In the movies, you want a good story and characters that are honest, but you are also looking for a good director who can lead the ship. That's how we look at business. Everybody has a great idea for a start-up, and so do their relatives, and they tell me, 'You gotta build it.' I say, 'I have to believe in it.'

There are two kinds of people... There are the dreamers who go and buy, and there are the doers who go and make. And I've always recognized that. So the dreamers are what support our company because they will buy the product that they could make if they wanted to, had time to, or were so inclined to.

I'd get kicked out of buildings all day long, people would rip up my business card in my face. It's a humbling business to be in. But I knew I could sell and I knew I wanted to sell something I had created. I cut the feet out of those pantyhose and I knew I was on to something. This was it.

As an entrepreneur you keep trying things, and I try everything. I try business ideas, on our website we test everything, iterate, iterate, iterate.

I founded Atari in my garage in Santa Clara while at Stanford. When I was in school, I took a lot of business classes. I was really fascinated by economics. You end up having to be a marketeer, finance maven and a little bit of a technologist in order to get a business going.

You need to invent things and you need to get them to people. You need to commercialize those inventions. Obviously, the best way we've come up with doing that is through companies.

In business, success often depends upon the relative age of your ideas.

There is no greater feeling in business than building a product which impacts people's lives in a profound way. When we look around at the thousands of people who have attended Summit gatherings, it makes us smile to see the new friendships, business partnerships and philanthropic initiatives that each event produces.

Business has only two functions - marketing and innovation.

If anyone said to me 'invent a new monster so we can sell more toys', I'd kick them out of my office.

Jobs has within him sort of this conflict, but he doesn't quite see it as a conflict between being hippie-ish and anti-materialistic but wanting to sell things like Wozniak's board. Wanting to create a business.

I'm an inventor. I don't enjoy running the business.

I've been good at product entrepreneuring.

The family on my mom's side, their whole business is inventing and pitching stuff. My grandfather is in infomercials. He's a pitchman, so if you're ever watching TV late at night, you'll probably see him pitching knives. My great-grandfather also invented the plastic cheese grater.

My passion for innovation and my interest in the 'business of science' has seen Biocon commercialize many innovative platforms and products.

I had to learn everything about manufacturing, patents and how to run a business, and eventually I came up with an prototype that worked.

Apple Computer would not have reached its current peak of success if it had feared to roll the dice and launch products that didn't always hit the mark. In the mid-1990s, the company was considered washed up, Steve Jobs had departed, and a string of lackluster product launches unrelated to the company's core business.

Once you understand business models you can then start prototyping business models just like you prototype products.

If you're doing business, not that simple to only buy. You have to create something. You have to create something that never exist for the future.

I have this passion for building things, so I always wanted to build a startup. I always wanted to start my own company.