Natalie Massenet Quotes

In Silicon Valley, if you spend a lot of time thinking about the obstacles, you'll talk yourself out of everything, because the more you look at it, the less logical something sounds, since no one has done it yet.

Almost anything worth doing involves some measure of risk - from learning to ride a bike, moving to a new city, and certainly, starting your own business. The point is that no one has ever started a business or created a new product with a guarantee of success.

Starting a business is like jumping out of an airplane without a parachute. In mid air, the entrepreneur begins building a parachute and hopes it opens before hitting the ground.

Like many of my fellow entrepreneurs, I didn't create Hearsay Social with my co-founder Steve Garrity because it would be fun and easy, but because we're at our best when faced with enormous challenges.

Innovation almost always is not successful the first time out. You try something, and it doesn't work, and it takes confidence to say we haven't failed yet... Ultimately, you become commercially successful.

If you only do things where you know the answer in advance, your company goes away.

'Mafiosa' was written by Veronica Russo. It's her first time making a film, and I'm really proud of her because this woman has a full-time job, and she decided one day, 'You know, I want to write a film, and I want to make it.'

Steve Jobs has been right twice. The first time we got Apple. The second time we got NeXT. The Macintosh ruled. NeXT tanked. Still, Jobs was right both times.

I am thoroughly enjoying spending the majority of my time with entrepreneurs. I find that their enthusiasm, dedication, willingness to take huge risks and desire to make a dramatic impact quite inspiring.

Any new venture, you gonna have some bumps in the road.

Hopefully, I can advise entrepreneurs to avoid mistakes. But you can never be sure if you're trying something new and unreasonable.

In technology startups, there's a lot of winging it.

One of the most brilliant parts of being a first-time founder is that you experience everything for the first time. It never gets old.

The only rollercoasters I get on are startups.

You know you're gonna have failures, there's no way to avoid it. Especially if you're an entrepreneur, if you're doing something new, of course there are gonna be mistakes. How can you not make mistakes? You don't know what you're going; it's unchartered territory.

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

The metaphor that I frequently use for entrepreneurship is jumping off a cliff and assembling an airplane plane on the way down.

So much of starting a business or affecting change is the confidence and courage to simply try.

When we got Tesla going at the very beginning, if you asked me what I thought the odds of success were, I would have said less than 50%. I would have said that failure is the most likely outcome.

When something doesn't go exactly to plan, money is tight or a business is struggling - see it as a challenge rather than a failure. Look outside the box and try and find a solution - you'll be surprised how many great opportunities and possibilities arise when things look bad. You've just got to open your mind and not be afraid of sticking your neck out!

Once you have made it, you will understand that any business is limited in the challenges it offers. You will want and need other games to play, so you will look for other ventures to hold your interest.

I didn't know what to expect coming into this year. There were a lot of question marks, and I think that's obvious now. Can we overcome it? Time will tell.

It's a very, very exciting time, but you can't help thinking or not quite knowing how it's seen from the outside. You're constantly in a state of terror or regret, not quite knowing how things are going to pan out, or whether you've made the right decisions. But, maybe that's just what it's like. Maybe that's just the life of it.

What is entrepreneurship, after all? Bigness is not the issue. Poor people are the ones who take challenges every day. The guy who sells a hot dog on the street is as much an entrepreneur as anyone else. Getting his $50 loan to start could be as difficult as finding $50 million for someone else. All people are entrepreneurs.

Founders: there is no shame in failing, take pride in that you have the guts to try something new.