Ana Patricia Botin Quotes

The world needs a better understanding of how to encourage innovation. And innovators need to get better at it. Sign me up.

Like many of my fellow entrepreneurs, I didn't create Hearsay Social with my co-founder Steve Garrity because it would be fun and easy, but because we're at our best when faced with enormous challenges.

For me, I always admire anyone that's entrepreneurs or inventors.

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.

The Internet has become an integral part of everyday life precisely because it has been an open-to-all land of opportunity where entrepreneurs, thinkers and innovators are free to try, fail and then try again.

America is full of entrepreneurs, inventors, and dreamers.

I told myself the next time I had a good idea, I would bring it to market.

We want Facebook to be one of the best places people can go to learn how to build stuff. If you want to build a company, nothing better than jumping in and trying to build one. But Facebook is also great for entrepreneurs/hackers. If people want to come for a few years and move on and build something great, that's something we're proud of.

Business is about people. It's about passion. It's about bold ideas, bold small ideas or bold large ideas.

I'd get kicked out of buildings all day long, people would rip up my business card in my face. It's a humbling business to be in. But I knew I could sell and I knew I wanted to sell something I had created. I cut the feet out of those pantyhose and I knew I was on to something. This was it.

We didn't know how to run a business, but we had dreams and talent.

What is interesting to me is to find ways to work with early-stage innovators to build from the edge and work on tomorrow's ideas.

Everywhere I go, I always look for creative entrepreneurs, whether it's artisans and craftsmen, small farmers and gardeners, or restaurateurs who use fresh, locally sourced ingredients. I admire the courage and self-reliance it takes to start your own business and make it succeed.

For a first-time entrepreneur, there's nothing better than being in Silicon Valley because there is so much going on, and there's such a large number of inventors, that even a B level idea or a C level idea could be nurtured and be given venture capital there.

All throughout my life I have been deeply immersed in startups, either because I was running one or investing in them or helping them.

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.

From the time I was a kid, I was always interested in any and all kinds of new business ideas.

Mostly what I'm focused on is finding people who are younger who haven't built companies before but have a good idea.

Ultimately, innovation depends on the people with advanced skills who have the ideas, and on the business risk-takers willing to back them.

The venture industry is both quite vibrant and quite competitive.

I like entrepreneurial people; I like people who take risks.

I wouldn't be who I am without my husband, who handled the business end of Donna Karan so I could be creative.

Entrepreneurs are misfits to the core. They forge ahead, making their own path and always, always, question the status quo.

America glories in its tradition of the self-made individual. Political candidates compete to be a friend to entrepreneurs, and policymakers, imagining the next Microsoft or Google, design laws to back the innovator in the garage.

Capital isn't that important in business. Experience isn't that important. You can get both of these things. What is important is ideas.