Thomas Middleditch Quotes

I think I have learnt more about business from fighting than anything else - from any book, from any, like - fighting is an incredible megastore for doing business.

I've had many failures in terms of technological... business... and even research failures. I really believe that entrepreneurship is about being able to face failure, manage failure and succeed after failing.

You can't get married to any one particular plan. That is the biggest lesson I learned at PayPal.

When I had challenges, it taught me to be more on top of it for the future. Things go wrong all the time when you're running your own business, but it's how you perceive it and deal with it that matters.

The essence of good business is knowing when to step on a train and when to step off.

Nobody talks of entrepreneurship as survival, but that's exactly what it is and what nurtures creative thinking.

I never had a plan. I have to say, I'm very shocked when people start a company and say, 'In five years I want to launch a perfume, or in 10 years I want to have this.' How can you know?

We need to accept that we won't always make the right decisions, that we'll screw up royally sometimes - understanding that failure is not the opposite of success, it's part of success.

What an entrepreneur does is to build for the long run. If the market is great, you get all of the resources you can. You build to it. But a good entrepreneur is always prepared to throttle back, put on the brakes, and if the world changes, adapt to the world.

I teach my children that in life, there is no control of what tomorrow is going to bring. There really isn't. But in whatever it brings, we have choices, and I'm glad because I made more right choices than wrong, but in the wrong choices, there are lessons to be learned.

You have to expect failure; not everything is going to work.

The challenge in a startup is you hit a lot of turbulence, and you want people who understand that it's just turbulence and not a crisis.

Working on a startup is a balancing act: being crazy enough to believe your idea can take off but not crazy enough to miss the signs when it's clearly not going to.

In business, if you realize you've made a bad decision, you change it.

Whenever you start a new business, the sheer number of variables at hand makes failure a constant possibility.

I think I've changed my business strategy every year since 2003. You have to be watching the horizon constantly. The rug has been pulled out from under our feet so many times.

You don't know what's going to happen in our business a year from now... so you have to be flexible and adaptable, and that's what we try to do.

I don't live my life based on fear of failure. I live my life with an understanding of failure and I'm embracing it, because every time I fail, I learn something new.

The only thing I can do is move forward and try to put myself in the best position to help this team win, and whatever decisions they make, I will just have to deal with it.

You have to be willing to fail, because you're not going to make every shot.

When you're starting a company, almost anything that can go wrong will go wrong, and it will probably look like and feel like you made the absolute wrong decision to start the company. If you're not absolutely determined to solve a problem or see something through, it might not make sense to keep going.

In today's rapidly changing world, the people who are not taking risk are the risk takers.

Don't be afraid to fail. Anything that I've ever attempted I was always willing to fail. You can't always win, but don't be afraid of making decisions.

I think our society is no longer properly valuing the intangible potential of innovation, even if we have to be a little uncomfortable with the risks associated with it, and a little bit willing to fail, pick ourselves up and dust ourselves off and try again. We don’t seem to want to do that as much as we used too.

In business, you take a swing and you hope that you hit a home run, but sometimes you strike out. Strikeouts and failures are important. Being down, getting punched in the gut every once in a while by life and coming back up, that's accomplishment.