Tom Ford Quotes

To be a designer today is to be an entrepreneur. Whether you're a two-man operation in Shoreditch or a 3,000-person, vertically integrated brand, you need to have the wherewithal to run your business through investment, considering everything from start-up funds to your exit plan or what it takes to go public.

Private enterprise in the history of civilization has never led large, expensive, dangerous projects with unknown risks. That has never happened because when you combine all these factors, you cannot create a capital market valuation of that activity.

I'm invested in about 13 private companies. I've advised probably another 50 private companies.

Young people in Israel are encouraged to design, produce and sell their products from high school. Technical universities also matter. Teach and introduce entrepreneurship courses in technical universities.

One thing I'm so grateful for is sidestepping the usual venture capital, private equity route. My friends who have gone that way are many times beholden to their boards of directors, to 'sell' ideas to a team.

When the venture industry started, it was enough to just have money and then it was enough to sort of have this big fuzzy brand. But now startups are getting a lot smarter.

Mitt Romney understands free enterprise, he has worked in it. He has seen companies succeed and he has seen them fail, too. He knows what people think about when they invest their money.

I didn't leave business school to go bankrupt.

It's much more difficult running a business than buying one.

Often, entrepreneurs don't build a board until they are forced to by their VCs when they raise their first financing round. This is dumb, as you are missing the opportunity to add at least one person to the team who - as a board member - can help you navigate the early process of building your company and raising that first round.

Most small-business owners have no financial education when they started. They weren't trained to be entrepreneurs.

The Big Dream of any entrepreneur really has very little to do with the entrepreneur. If you truly love repairing automobiles, chances are, you'll be a lousy business owner. Likewise, if you are fascinated by debits and credits, the dream of building an accounting firm with you at the helm is probably best left unfulfilled.

I have started many companies now worth more than $100 million. So I know a little about business.

I own a company called Rain Industries.

When I graduate, I will either run a division of a company... or I'll get funding for my own company.

Quit being 'busy' and start actively owning and operating your company, and you'll be able to understand where the money is coming from and how to make more of it.

In the mid-to-late 1990s, I was an entrepreneur-in-residence at the Kauffman Foundation working with Jana Matthews on 'learning programs for high growth entrepreneurs.'

We think the ownership culture is very important, so we like to invest in businesses whose leaders are also owners.

Can anyone create an enduring business on the Web, where it's easy to build new companies, and when survival depends on the whims of fickle users? The big lesson of 'Digg' may be simply this: if someone offers you a ridiculous amount of money for a company that wasn't that hard to build, don't think twice. Take the money and run.

As a serial investor who has raised hundreds of millions of dollars for startups, I know that the business plans coming out of incubators tend to be vetted and more thoroughly validated. The incubator's input into your business plan will make you look far more polished and experienced - even if you have never run a business before.

There's certain circumstances, there's certain situations, there's certain decisions that have to be made based upon the business and you can't take that personal.

As a serial entrepreneur, angel investor and public company CEO, nothing irks me more than when a startup founder talks about wanting to cash in with an initial public offering.

You learn really quickly how not only to be an artist, but you also become all of a sudden the CEO and owners of a company that you have to make major decisions about that I don't think we were fully prepared for in the beginning.

For better or worse, a lot of people who build things don't want to part ways. They don't have the short exit plan that a lot of the investors have.

The companies that choose to list on Nasdaq are among the most innovative, risk-taking businesses in the world, and they are proof to us all that prudent risk-taking drives our economy forward.