Company Founding Quotes

You can't be an entrepreneur for other people. You can't start a company for other people. You have to love it more than you ever thought of loving something that wasn't a human being. The demands will kick you down and rob your life - but yet, it is so rewarding.

When you start a company, it's more an art than a science because it's totally unknown. Instead of solving high-profile problems, try to solve something that's deeply personal to you. Ideally, if you're an ordinary person and you've just solved your problem, you might have solved the problem for millions of people.

Starting a company is like throwing yourself off the cliff and assembling an airplane on the way down.

I feel I am a role model to many, not just for my designs, but also for the fact that I started my own company with the help of my two friends. I became a success story, and people relate to that.

The fact is, there are Fortune 500 companies that have been founded during recessions.

How can you get fired from the company you started?

Whenever I talk to people who founded a company, I often like to ask the prehistory questions 'When did you meet? How long have you been working before you started the company?' A bad answer is, 'We met at a networking event a week ago, and we started a company because we both want to be entrepreneurs.'

I've been an entrepreneur three times. I started three companies.

Starting a successful company is one of the hardest things anyone does.

I started my first company when I was 18 and learned by trial through fire, having no formal education or entrepreneurial experience.

I started a theater company when I was 17.

When we first showed the Karma in January 2008, we had barely started the company.

I had dreams of starting a company like Burmah Shell.

So March 2010, we launched Pinterest, and we were at 3,000 accounts. And that wouldn't be so bad if we hadn't started building Pinterest actually in November 2009. And that alone wouldn't have been so bad if I hadn't left my job to start a company in May 2008.

It's lonely at the top - if you don't like that, then you don't start a company.

Do I want to start my own production company? No, I doubt it. I'm too old for that. I don't want to start anything.

You should stay closely connected to the technology when you start your company.

What launched me toward Feedburner? Well, the Internet happened. When I saw Mosaic, I thought, 'I gotta do this.' I founded and sold a few companies. Feedburner was my fourth.

For the most part, I've sat on the sidelines over the years during the endless debates about how we need to do more to encourage more women to start companies.

I came up with the idea for what later became Paychex in 1970 when I was working for Electronic Accounting Systems, a company that sold payroll processing to companies with 50 to 1,000 employees.

Relatively few people should start companies.

Maybe it's whiner's fatigue, but I'm getting tired of hearing about how hard it is to start a company and be a CEO. It's not that hard.

That business we started with 10 people has now grown into a great American success story. Some of the companies we helped start are names you know. An office supply company called Staples – where I’m pleased to see the Obama campaign has been shopping; The Sports Authority, which became a favorite of my sons. We started an early childhood learning center called Bright Horizons that First Lady Michelle Obama rightly praised. At a time when nobody thought we’d ever see a new steel mill built in America, we took a chance and built one in a corn field in Indiana.

I wasn't that interested in the dollars-and-cents part of business. My interest in starting Mary Kay Inc. was to offer women opportunities that didn't exist anywhere else.

I feel that the best companies are started not because the founder wanted a company but because the founder wanted to change the world... If you decide you want to found a company, you maybe start to develop your first idea. And hire lots of workers.