David Cohen Quotes

I think entrepreneurs should demand transparency for startup accelerators.

You will find that every successful entrepreneur has suffered many setbacks. These entrepreneurs just forget to mention these when they are doing interviews with the 'Wall Street Journal' or Bloomberg TV.

Branding jails corporate America, but honesty sets entrepreneurs free.

Entrepreneurs go through real problems and come up with real solutions. It's not fake. You can do all the right things and still lose. You can do all the wrong things and still will.

I never said I enjoy anything about using the Internet. I enjoy helping the entrepreneurs who are building this thing that I don't necessarily like or use.

But as an entrepreneur you have to feel like you can jump out of an aeroplane because you're confident that you'll catch a bird flying by. It's an act of stupidity, and most entrepreneurs go splat because the bird doesn't come by, but a few times it does.

Entrepreneurs are risk takers, willing to roll the dice with their money or reputation on the line in support of an idea or enterprise. They willingly assume responsibility for the success or failure of a venture and are answerable for all its facets.

For me, the most entertaining evening would be to go sit with entrepreneurs and talk with them about how they're building their companies and how we can help to make them better. That's the one thing in the world - well, I love doing that.

So many of my rookie mistakes could have been avoided by first-hand exposure to other, more experienced technology entrepreneurs.

I've been very engaged in Illinois and Chicago civic activities for a long time; mostly around building businesses and helping entrepreneurs grow companies, but also around education and education reform.

When most people hit failure, they give up, but good entrepreneurs simply treat failure as a learning experience and use it to fuel and inform their next move.

We worked personally with a lot of great VCs. They just work incredibly hard at supporting entrepreneurs and their companies.

In the end, I think that people that are not willing to take the risk to fail are not true entrepreneurs.

I have met many entrepreneurs who have the passion and even the work ethic to succeed - but who are so obsessed with an idea that they don't see its obvious flaws. Think about that. If you can't even acknowledge your failures, how can you cut the rope and move on?

Big businesses can help by engaging aspiring entrepreneurs and promoting initiatives which support small businesses from within.

Look at MIT—the smartest people in the world. They start up 50 companies a year. Only 1 makes it.

Entrepreneurs … benefit greatly from being willing to fail, willing to experiment. Good entrepreneurs tend to be stubborn on the vision but flexible on the details. They’re persistent on what they’re trying to accomplish, but they are willing to rewrite the details as needed as they learn and as things fail.

In my view, the first requirement for success for an entrepreneur is to dream big. The second aspect that prevents entrepreneurs from succeeding is fear of failure.

We, as entrepreneurs, can be held responsible for our actions every single day, not every election cycle.

I do think there are more and more entrepreneurs all the time that think big. Those are the people we should be finding and funding. Most of them will fail, but the ones who succeed will change the world, and that is progress.

I don't know any successful entrepreneur that doesn't have at least a handful of stories about the things they did that went horribly wrong.

Some incubators, like Y Combinator and TechStars, were started by successful entrepreneurs wishing to help the next generation learn from their experiences. Other programs, such as Viterbi Startup Garage and Austin Technology Incubator, were created by universities to help young entrepreneurs bridge the knowledge gap from student to funded company.

Finding entrepreneurs from diverse and international backgrounds is a top priority for us at Y Combinator.

Inexperienced entrepreneurs often want to keep their plans secret, but this is never how I've seen any of the great companies get built.

To stimulate the economy, we need to give entrepreneurs the means to create wealth.