Blake Mycoskie Quotes

I hear so many startups talking about how they can raise VC instead of questioning whether they need it in the first place.

As I've said, in 2007, we're free to go and we'll just have to do what's best for the business.

A savvy entrepreneur will not always look for investment money, first.

Fortunately we're not a public company - we're a private group of companies, and I can do what I want.

Mitt Romney understands free enterprise, he has worked in it. He has seen companies succeed and he has seen them fail, too. He knows what people think about when they invest their money.

As a serial entrepreneur, angel investor and public company CEO, nothing irks me more than when a startup founder talks about wanting to cash in with an initial public offering.

Being bootstrapped is great. You own 100 percent of it. But the downside is that you aren't able to move as fast as you want.

We're so used to financing things on our own that we always have a plan in place to sort of scale our ideas.

When you found a company, you have the original vision, you make all the original decisions, you know every employee, you kind of know every aspect of the product architecture and its limitations.

Well, I think that there's a very thin dividing line between success and failure. And I think if you start a business without financial backing, you're likely to go the wrong side of that dividing line.

I have never run a public company. I spent my entire life working for a private company.

To be a designer today is to be an entrepreneur. Whether you're a two-man operation in Shoreditch or a 3,000-person, vertically integrated brand, you need to have the wherewithal to run your business through investment, considering everything from start-up funds to your exit plan or what it takes to go public.

I love what I do. I don't do it for the money. I work on behalf of investors that I like and want to do well for. I'm a competitive person.

I don't believe in public companies... I would prefer to risk my own money, make any necessary changes fast and grow as quickly as possible.

The best thing is to go public only when you're absolutely sure that's the right move for the company. And in order to make sure that is the case, you need to have as much control over the company as possible, which means not giving up control early on.

One thing that has made us so successful is that we've never taken outside investment. That means we can concentrate on what our customers want - not what the stockholders or the VCs want.

There was a time when I was wondering about this business of going public, so I visited about a half-dozen companies in the Boston area, all of them formed by MIT faculty and all had gone public.

Private enterprise in the history of civilization has never led large, expensive, dangerous projects with unknown risks. That has never happened because when you combine all these factors, you cannot create a capital market valuation of that activity.

All entrepreneurs make decisions. Some will go right, and some will not go that right.

At 25, I made many companies. I was thinking more like a businessman or entrepreneur than a CEO. I created many companies, small companies, medium companies. I tried to be involved in many kinds of activities, in finance, in real estate, in mining.

I'm invested in about 13 private companies. I've advised probably another 50 private companies.

I started LearnVest with a tiny savings account where I paid designers, technologists, and even bartered... Because I started with paying for things myself with my own savings, it sharpened my focus of how to spend money.

When I read about young designers selling 51 percent of their company to someone else, I cringe. I want to say, 'Don't do it - call me first.'

Going public is 18-month process, while an acquisition is a 6-month process. Going public means going under so much scrutiny, regulatory approval, auditing, magnified 10 times. Having the stomach to do that isn't necessarily in my DNA. My DNA is building a product and a service.

I'm used to doing big undertakings with my own money.