Ruth Handler Quotes

A business has to be involving, it has to be fun, and it has to exercise your creative instincts.

I'm a big fan of small business ownership. I think it's the backbone of American innovation. But to be successful, you first have to have the courage to go for it.

Everyone is an entrepreneur. The only skills you need to be an entrepreneur: an ability to fail, an ability to have ideas, to sell those ideas, to execute on those ideas, and to be persistent so even as you fail you learn and move onto the next adventure.

Being an entrepreneur means being a creative businessperson.

An entrepreneur, whether man or woman, has to be willing to take help, whether financial or technical, to grow his or her business.

The biggest problem I see with early-stage entrepreneurs is they get the idea in their head, and they leave it in their head. And they begin embellishing it in their head, making it more ornate. They add on the second story to their dream house - then add the tennis court and the turrets and the gargoyles.

Creativity and business acumen don't always go hand in hand.

The point of an accelerator is to teach you about companies and business, not about technology.

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.

A man to carry on a successful business must have imagination. He must see things as in a vision, a dream of the whole thing.

I admire the courage and self-reliance it takes to start your own business and make it succeed.

Great businessmen are creators.

I always knew I wanted to run a business someday.

I always knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I started my own software company in high school and went to college to study entrepreneurship.

Business and growing jobs is about taking risk, sometimes failing, sometimes succeeding, but always striving. It is about dreams. Usually, it doesn't work out exactly as you might have imagined. Steve Jobs was fired at Apple. He came back and changed the world.

As an entrepreneur, you work out solutions.

… good luck and good timing are huge components of outsized success in entrepreneurial endeavors. Lots of things have to go right, and the planets have to align; that certainly happened in Amazon’s case. Our timing turned out to be very good. And so you can’t sit down to write a business plan and say you’re going to build a multibillion-dollar corporation; that’s unrealistic.

Anytime is a good time to start a company.

We need people who dream impossible things, who maybe fail, sometimes succeed, but in any case who have that ambition.

Taking risks and being focused, sometimes, are at odds. Both are required to build a great company.

I think entrepreneurship is combining a passion with the tenacity to problem-solve and the fearlessness to fail.

A lot of people have a great business idea; they just need a little push to make it a reality.

All of us have an entrepreneur in us.

I enjoy business, being an entrepreneur on every level. I really enjoy it.

Entrepreneurship is, in large part, about building something from nothing, which means creating a cause.