Aaron Levie Quotes

Adversity is the mother of enterprise.

Having more success allows you more freedom to take more risks and do things.

There's an energy and excitement when you're building a company. You have so much tail wind. You're planting new seeds. But it's also scary, because there's no safety net.

When times are bad is when the real entrepreneurs emerge.

Times of great calamity and confusion have been productive for the greatest minds. The purest ore is produced from the hottest furnace. The brightest thunder-bolt is elicited from the darkest storm.

I tend to not discriminate when it comes to people I can learn from. Basically, if someone has built a meaningful business in software, technology or media, faced disruption and adversity, and overcame underdog status, I want to know how they did it.

Optimistic people play a disproportionate role in shaping our lives. Their decisions make a difference; they are inventors, entrepreneurs, political and military leaders - not average people. They got to where they are by seeking challenges and taking risks.

We go there with confidence, but we know there is a very fine line between success and failure in this game.

It's easy to walk away from risk, and you don't actually have to face it. Success is based upon overcoming the inherent risk you can't manage your way out of.

Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope.

I'm never doing anything by rote. I'm only on thin ice, and I think that that's a good place to be. I feel like when you push yourself like that, the rewards can be pretty great.

Starting a company is like throwing yourself off the cliff and assembling an airplane on the way down.

We go out, we explore, we take risk. And our successes have to pay for all that.

You have to motivate people to take almost certain failure to get a small amount of success, which has driven our economy forward.

I have always said that you have to fail. If you do not fail, it means you have never taken enough risks.

One becomes an entrepreneur to break the glass ceiling and that's when you grow the market. Of course, in that process you have to be prepared to get hurt. You will get hurt. But I'm a doer and I like taking risks.

I just happen to love problems. Because I see problems as opportunities.

You're going up against the billionaire boys' club or trying to find your way into something you have no basis for, and it's bigger than anything you ever imagined - and then actually having that work. Having that risk pan out. It taught me to be very fearless - maybe too fearless in the end.

The most successful people in American life are those that have had horrific failures and have come back, done it again and again until they got it right, whether it's Steve Jobs or Bill Gates or Warren Buffet.

Nobody ever died of discomfort, yet living in the name of comfort has killed more ideas, more opportunities, more actions, and more growth than everything else combined. Comfort kills!

Life is a crisis - so what!

In today's rapidly changing world, the people who are not taking risk are the risk takers.

When you're an underdog, you're forced to try things you would never otherwise have attempted.

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.

Choose to be entrepreneur because then YOU create value. Choose to be an entrepreneur because the products, services, and jobs you create then become the lifeblood of our nation. But most of all, choose to be an entrepreneur because then you desire a life of adventure, endless challenge, and the opportunity to be your BEST SELF.