Shawn Fanning Quotes

I'm a school dropout. So, at the age of 16, I moved to Mumbai to try my luck on some business.

If you wait for the right time or the good times to start a business, you wait all your life.

I didn't have that when I invented MyPillow. I didn't have a safety net.

It was tennis that got me started in business. When I was 16 and about to embark on my A-levels, I set up a tennis academy and became one of the youngest qualified tennis coaches in the country. It did well; by the time I was 19 I was able to buy my first house.

I left Google after four years of working on Google Maps, search, and Google TV as a product marketing manager. I knew I wanted to do something on my own.

I can honestly say that I've done everything I've wanted to do, always. Not without difficulty. But every time I wanted to do something, I just did it, from the age of 18 when I started my own theater with my friends. When I decided I wanted to act. I just bit the bullet.

I had always thought of starting my own record company. I haven't regretted the decision - yet!

I was about to get a degree in economics when I accepted that I'd be a lousy businessman, and if I didn't give acting a try I'd regret it for the rest of my life.

To my mind, the best investment a young man starting out in business can possibly make is to give all his time, all his energies, to work - just plain, hard work.

It wasn't until we got our first office in Palo Alto where things became more like a company. We never went into this wanting to build a company.

I view risk-aversion as crippling America in many ways.

And I not only inherited an aversion to the nine-to-five routine, but the sense from my parents that being bored and boring is the worst thing that you can be.

I would rather do a project that I've invested so much time to, rather than try to get a part on another show.

The trouble with being educated is that it takes a long time; it uses up the better part of your life and when you are finished what you know is that you would have benefited more by going into banking.

I had $20,000, and I started up JYSK.

I just know that it's smart for my career to carve my own path and do my own thing.

I'm not really sure where it comes from, but every time I meet someone who says 'I really want to be an entrepreneur' but has no idea what they want to do, I really just think: 'This person is totally aimless.'

I didn't take anything from anyone - first of all. Second of all, I opened a comedy club with money that I saved over 25 years. I created jobs.

Recessions are the best time to start a company. Companies fail. Others hold back capital. If you are willing to do the preparation and work, it is the best time to invest in yourself and start a business.

I like to encourage people who are entrepreneurs-in-waiting.

Maybe if you and ten of your friends could pool your savings and borrow some money and actually buy some obscure station in Sonoma, and then take some chances and have some fun.

Entrepreneurship is not for everyone.

Sometimes I make very selfish choices; like I did 'Once Upon A Time' for my inner 8-year-old and my hypothetical future child. I've done some movies because I would regret them if I didn't, but other projects I've done because they've scared me or if I felt I needed to do a big romantic comedy to help me professionally.

Believe it or not, the first spark for everything I've done today came down to me meeting one person in college who changed my life. A student named Anthony Adams who lived across the hall from me in our freshman dorm showed me what it meant to be an 'entrepreneur' when I saw him launch his own start-up company.

For me, the risks in terms of opening that brewpub were fairly high. I put my house up as collateral, I invested the liquid money I had and two years of my time to get it over, but that's really not much of a risk for what the potential reward was if it worked.