Fred Wilson Quotes

For me, the winning strategy in any start-up business is, 'Think big but start small.'

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

To turn really interesting ideas and fledgling technologies into a company that can continue to innovate for years, it requires a lot of disciplines.

Startups have finite time and resources to find product/market fit before they run out of money. Therefore startups trade off certainty for speed, adopting 'good enough decision making' and iterating and pivoting as they fail, learn, and discover their business model.

As a first-time CEO, I wasn't sure if I would scale to run IronPort long-term. But I wanted a legitimate shot at it.

I think there are too many start-ups and not enough real companies.

One of my philosophies of building companies is the importance of velocity.

The ideal time period to get an investment is when you've already proved your concept and know what you're doing, and it's about adding water to the seeds.

That's been the secret to 'Gas Monkey': Move fast. I opened the first restaurant within a year and a half. Most people wait five years. I always move quickly, and in today's market, no matter what you're in, you can recover from a mistake faster than you can recover from not doing.

I'm in favour of entrepreneurial, risk-taking businesses that create great products and services.

Plenty of entrepreneurs can start a company. What is more rare is to evolve it and to scale with it over time.

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

If you want to build a startup that has a good chance of succeeding, don't listen to me. Listen to Paul Graham and others who are applying tons of data to the idea of startup success. That will maximize your chance of being successful.

Business wise, I have always learned valuable lessons so I don't regret any decisions I have made.

An adaptable company is one that captures more than its fair share of new opportunities. It's always redefining its 'core business' in ways that open up new avenues for growth.

I got really excited about the idea of data-driven startup just as I was starting Kaggle.

There's always something happening in the world that creates an opportunity to try to fix a business and build a business.

The major challenge facing most foundations is that they are risk averse. This inhibits their ability to experiment and commit to the experimentation and innovation process.

There are different ways to do innovation. You can plant a lot of seeds, not be committed to any particular one of them, but just see what grows. And this really isn't how we've approached this. We go mission-first, then focus on the pieces we need and go deep on them and be committed to them.

How many times have you been out for a beer or dinner and people are coming up with business ideas? Everybody wants to think they've got that great business idea.

Basically if you study entrepreneurs, there is a misnomer: People think that entrepreneurs take risk, and they get rewarded because they take risk. In reality entrepreneurs do everything they can to minimize risk. They are not interested in taking risk. They want free lunches and they go after free lunches.

Fact is, inventing an innovative business model is often mostly a matter of serendipity.

Most people end up owning a business by accident. Therefore, they don't usually have a thought process and a strategic plan in place.

I would say, as an entrepreneur everything you do - every action you take in product development, in marketing, every conversation you have, everything you do - is an experiment. If you can conceptualize your work not as building features, not as launching campaigns, but as running experiments, you can get radically more done with less effort.

If every effect of any new products or methods were required to be known before they could be produced and marketed, they would not be true innovations - and thus not represent new knowledge of what people would like, if offered.