Kevin O'Leary Quotes

I think everybody at IBM knows the early 1990s disaster, and it's in our fabric that you cannot miss the ship.

When I started my company, many people said I shouldn't launch it as a retail concept because it was too big a risk. They told me to launch as a wholesaler to test the waters - because that was the traditional way.

Tell your idea to whomever will listen, and you'll get valuable market feedback before writing a single line of code.

When talking to first-time entrepreneurs, I often ask them: 'How do you know that people want your product or service?' As you can expect, the answer is often that they don't yet, but will know once they launch. And they're right. That's why it's critical to launch as quickly as possible so you can get that feedback.

I love criticism. Equitable Life went down because management wouldn't brook criticism, but if you are in business, you have to hear what's going wrong.

It's much easier to fail when you're in the pilot, early stage, when it's less expensive and you're exploring than when you're way out the door and you've spent all this money. Industry is smart: structured to have skunkworks and pilot phases.

There are lots of businesses that are well in excess of $9 billion that have gone into bankruptcy, that have been mismanaged. And that has not served anyone very well.

The grim reality is that most start-ups fail. Most new products are not successful. Yet the story of perseverance, creative genius, and hard work persists.

No one would say, 'Hey, I think this medicine works, go ahead and use it.' We have testing, we go to the lab, we try it again, we have refinement. But you know what we do on the last mile? 'Oh, this is a good idea. People will like this. Let's put it out there.'

In modern business it is not the crook who is to be feared most, it is the honest man who doesn't know what he is doing.

If you are ready to put a product or service on the market, look at that product or service and see how you can test it inexpensively. Keep in mind, you'll only need one; you don't need 1,000 to get the answer.

When you lose control of risk at a financial institution, you do a variety of unfortunate credit extensions or purchases - and all of a sudden, you've blown up your business.

Whenever you start a new business, the sheer number of variables at hand makes failure a constant possibility.

When you get into investing, your default stance should be 'No,' because most deals suck. Most deals won't make money. Most companies will fail.

As an entrepreneur and public company CEO, I've dealt with dozens of rollouts, and when unveiling a new product, the operating approach should be, 'Hope for the best but prepare for the worst.'

If we launch a new product, we have to time it right. It's not about how soon you can do it but how well we can do it.

Nine out of ten businesses fail; so I came up with a foolproof plan - create ten businesses.

I think the people who've been the most overconfident in our business in the last decade have been the people that called themselves risk managers.

If you study the root causes of business disasters, over and over you'll find this predisposition toward endeavors that offer immediate gratification.

Part of the entrepreneurial thing is there are lots of ways to die.

Most companies don't die because they are wrong; they die because they don't commit themselves. They fritter away their momentum and their valuable resources while attempting to make a decision. The greatest danger is standing still.

You don't have to test everything to destruction just to see if you made it right.

Businesses always have opportunities to improve service, product lines, manufacturing techniques, and the like, and obviously these opportunities should be seized. But a business that constantly encounters major change also encounters many chances for major error

If you're going to fail, you'd rather fail early than fail late in general.

Only the careless leave a possibility unattended due to assumptions.