Richard Branson Quotes

I've been good at product entrepreneuring.

Apple Computer would not have reached its current peak of success if it had feared to roll the dice and launch products that didn't always hit the mark. In the mid-1990s, the company was considered washed up, Steve Jobs had departed, and a string of lackluster product launches unrelated to the company's core business.

Entrepreneurs need to start building today. The barrier to entry in tech is low, so start designing, start coding it, launch it, build prototypes, build a working version of it. The Internet has amazing powers of distribution. You can test your ideas. You can see if it works, if it doesn't work, whether it's fun, and whether you're sufficiently motivated. People who go into entrepreneurship to get rich aren't going to be happy. It’s the building of things that makes you happy. You have to enjoy the process whether you succeed or fail.

I have no secret. There are no rules to follow in business. I just work hard and, as I always have done, believe I can do it. Most of all, though, I try to have fun.

Even though Traf-O-Data wasn't a roaring success, it was seminal in preparing us to make Microsoft's first product a couple of years later.

I keep a band of great young people around me, and we're not musically restrained. It's not about 'Let's do it correct' but 'Let's do it right.'

Focus on your product. A lot of people focus on the name of their brand or the legal aspects, but it's more important to create your product. It's why people join. It's your vision. Without your product, nothing is going to happen.

I'm a kind of an entrepreneur.

It's all about producing products people want.

'How I Built This With Guy Raz' asks entrepreneurs to tell the story of how they made their name and, in some cases, their fortune. Whether they're in the business of selling burritos or dating apps, there's inevitably something you can learn from their stories.

Well, you know, I've always been an entrepreneur. I've had it out of necessity.

'Bazillion Dollar Club' follows six struggling startups trying to get their products together.

Entrepreneurship, to me, means that you're a psychopath. The world doesn't work in the way you want it to, and you have a vision for how it should work. Unlike everyone else, this isn't OK with you. You have to go out, against every possible odd, and do something about it. That's what makes you crazy.

Bell Labs was a fantastic research organization but having them create and market new products for the world was terrible. They were not good marketers and yet it was AT&T engineers who were deciding what the products of the future were.

Don't worry about failure; you only have to be right once.

Entrepreneurial business favours the open mind. It favours people whose optimism drives them to prepare for many possible futures, pretty much purely for the joy of doing so.

The Googly thing is to launch products early on Google Labs and then iterate, learning what the market wants - and making it great. The beauty of experimenting in this way is that you never get too far from what the market wants. The market pulls you back.

We don't believe in market research for a new product unknown to the public. So we never do any.

A business model that hasn't been tried before is always interesting, even if it's likely to fail.

To create something you want to sell, you first study and research the market, then you develop the product to the best of your ability.

A vision is something you see and others don't. Some people would say that's a pocket definition of lunacy. But it also defines entrepreneurial spirit.

It has taken more than a hundred scientists two years to find out how to make the product in question; I have been given thirty days to create its personality and plan its launching. If I do my job well, I shall contribute as much as the hundred scientists to the success of this product.

Everything I've done hasn't worked out - you know, some things aren't as great as others - but I'm having so much fun, who cares? Isn't that what an artist is supposed to do? We're trying to change the world. Otherwise, why be an artist? You want to shake people up and make 'em think.

Market growth alone doesn't give you enough tailwind. You have to create your own. The way to do that is by designing products for consumers that wow them.

I don't think I'm a risk-taker. I don't think any entrepreneur is. I think that's one of those myths of commerce. The new entrepreneur is more values-led: you do what looks risky to other people because that's what your convictions tell you to do. Other companies would say I'm taking risks, but that's my path - it doesn't feel like risk to me.