John Roos Quotes

What created Silicon Valley was a culture of openness, and there is no future to Silicon Valley without it.

When Facebook famously moved out to Palo Alto, there were people in the same house Facebook was based in working on different ideas. It is vital to remember that.

I think the most important trait for an entrepreneur is persistence. When you try to do something new and difficult, you are more likely to fail than to succeed.

It seems the best approach for any venture is a combo platter - Japan's quality-consciousness paired with America's willingness to experiment and (sometimes) fail.

Entrepreneurship requires flexibility and an open society, and there will always be people who succeed and people who follow. For those who lead, they have an obligation to create a better life for the people around them.

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.

Elon Musk is an incredibly prolific entrepreneur, having come up with, or been at the founding team of Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity, PayPal, all different industries that seem to have nothing to do with each other.

We want everyone who comes through to feel more entrepreneurial and start companies, even if they fail.

In addition to encouraging failure, I would also encourage companies to broadly create a culture of innovation. That should mean more than just technology and invention; it should mean something millennials know well: Ingenuity.

At the end of the day, if you want to create more IP and more invention, you need to connect between research and entrepreneurs. People who are going to take a risk.

Outsiders think of Silicon Valley as a success story, but in truth, it is a graveyard. Failure.. is Silicon Valley's greatest strength. Every failed product or enterprise is a lesson stored in the collective memory of the country. We not only don't stigmatize failure, sometime we even admire it. Venture Capitalists actually like to see a little failure in the resumes of entrepreneurs.

I started SpaceX with the expectation of failure.

I nearly failed when Virgin was in its infancy; I nearly failed in the early 1980s, and, of course, I have nearly died more than once trying to achieve a world record for boating or ballooning. But through a combination of luck and planning, both Virgin and I are still here.

Remember, I'm someone who got fired from Disney and eight days later started the first studio in 65 years with two of the most brilliant, successful people in the history of the entertainment business, doing something everyone said was somewhere between improbable and impossible. I'm afraid that's exactly what I love doing.

When I took the entrepreneurship class at Stanford, the first lecture was about an entrepreneur and his personality. They described it as being different than a businessman, who is an overall scientific manager.

You have to think that the answer - and the right answer - for you and your organization might not be something that's been done before. And it's up to you to discover and work with your team to form and figure out how to do successfully.

I'm very, very used to hearing no - repeatedly! - and through my experience founding startups, I've learned to view those two little letters not as a final roadblock but as a problem to be solved.

Different parts of the world have different attitudes to failure. Arguably, it may take more courage to be an entrepreneur in Sydney, or Paris, or London, or Japan, or Singapore... but an entrepreneur sees the world for what it could be, not what it is.

I've never had a business plan. Every project we've ever done was the intersection of somebody with a real need, a real passion to do something, and hustling.

What makes Silicon Valley really work? It's a unique combination of great educational institutions - especially at Stanford - that generate engineers and a culture that starts companies.

Part of the power of having startup communities is it continues to challenge the status quo. So for many of these cities that were once very important and powerful that today are struggling, startup communities are a way for them to rejuvenate themselves.

Entrepreneurship is usually about people executing in the face of other folks telling them that it's not going to work.

The greatest challenge to most innovation centers around the world is many nations' punitive attitudes towards failure. In most of the world, if your first business fails, no one will work with you again. But, trial and error is the genesis of innovation.

The people who are changing our world are starting from an idea and bringing it all the way through to finished product with the power of their intellect, training, tools and available products.

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