Troy Carter Quotes

I really want to work for myself and build a business from nowhere.

How many times have you been out for a beer or dinner and people are coming up with business ideas? Everybody wants to think they've got that great business idea.

In the founders, I look for a person I feel is trustworthy, driven and smart. I invest in the person first, because in the event the business fails, the person and I can move forward and create another business.

As the years passed, and I was nine, 10, 11 years old, it became obvious I was going to start up a business of some sort.

My dream was to set up my own e-commerce company. In 1999, I gathered 18 people in my apartment and spoke to them for two hours about my vision. Everyone put their money on the table, and that got us $60,000 to start Alibaba. I wanted to have a global company, so I chose a global name.

We are shifting from a managerial society to an entrepreneurial society.

I'm not the smartest guy you've ever met, or the hardest-working. I was a mediocre student. I'm not technical at all - I can't write a word of code. What sets me apart, I think, is a tolerance for risk and an intuition about what will happen in the future. Seeing where things are headed is the essence of entrepreneurship.

I wanted to build businesses from the time I was little.

I think that's exactly what Silicon Valley was all about in those days. Let's do a startup in our parents' garage and try to create a business.

Did Google know much about media? Or Amazon about commerce? Tesla about cars? SpaceX about rockets? EBay about classifieds? What did I know about computing when I started Sun Microsystems? We should celebrate these entrepreneurs, not pillory them for fighting entrenched incumbent industries that have political influence and money.

For decades, technology entrepreneurship has been revered, and people like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk were heroes.

There's no such thing as a good time. I started an apparel-manufacturing business in the tech-boom years. I mean, come on. Get out of your garage and go take a chance and start your business.

There are a lot more companies with a lot younger people. It is just like 23-year-olds are starting companies, and they are scaling really quickly.

Not everybody wants to be Mark Zuckerberg, but everybody wants to create a little piece of the American dream, the Silicon Valley version. I don't think that's a bad thing.

You have to be delusional to get into this business, you know?

I'm in favour of entrepreneurial, risk-taking businesses that create great products and services.

Entrepreneurship is having an idea to do something great and not entirely have a plan on how to do it but the drive and will power to make it work

I'm also a big believer of being a scrappy entrepreneur. To be successful you don't have to have all this crazy start-up capital or a ton of knowledge. I think it's actually helpful sometimes to not know all the rules because that way it's easier to break them. And that's why it's so much easier for younger people, I think, to start companies that are challenging more traditional business models than older people. Especially if you're trying to do something good.

The story of the entrepreneur... is the story of forward progress, of pursuing one's dreams and goals no matter how outlandish they seem to others. The entrepreneur, like the pioneer, pushes boundaries in search of what's new, what's next. Sometimes, he brings the whole society with him, rushing forward together into a next phase of our communal human life.

A Start Up is an institution designed to thrive in the soil of extreme uncertainty

One of our things is that money follows; it does not lead. So we want people that are fired up and passionate about their mission... and people that aren't so married to spreadsheets and thinking that kind of voodoo controls the future. Because it doesn't.

I know this: Jerry Jones is unique, he's as cool as James Bond and he has a command of his business. He can step into any arena and succeed.

Ultimately, I didn't quite find the company I wanted to join, but I met more than 100 entrepreneurs and realized that all these entrepreneurs were just as unqualified as I was. If I wanted to be this retailer of the future, or if I wanted to join the retailer of the future, I could just start it.

Being a great founder or early team member is a difficult dialectic - you have to be a bit overconfident, and a big ego isn't always a bad thing. To change the world requires pushing really, really hard and believing you and your team know something others don't.

We never would have built ClassPass if I hadn't learned so much from the Classtivity experience.