Entrepreneurial Experience Quotes

The years I would have spent at University, I spent building Student Magazine and Virgin Records. For me that was far more fun and satisfying. I have treated everyday as the University education I never had and think I learnt more about business and life than I would have at University in the process.

There has been no great surprise, no sudden revelation. I knew pretty much what I was getting into. What I've learned is that a restaurant can be as much of an art as you want it to be, but it has to be a successful business first.

I always worked in institutions, I never had a restaurant of my own before, but I have opened over 30 hotels, restaurants and casinos. I understand what it takes to keep them running.

I came to music and knowing a little bit about life, and I came to music knowing a lot about business - and that's a real advantage. By the time I came to music, I had purchased real estate, opened restaurants, and been in the business world, so the music business didn't blindside me.

I've always said that the better off you are, the more responsibility you have for helping others. Just as I think it's important to run companies well, with a close eye to the bottom line, I think you have to use your entrepreneurial experience to make corporate philanthropy effective.

I understand small business growth. I was one.

I think I was really lucky to work as a little kid at PayPal, grew up in the Valley as a coder.

After serving as a U.S. Navy SEAL, I started a business. In four years, it failed incredibly, but I learned a lot about business, raising equity, and choosing partners.

Generally speaking, experience counts for something. So you'd expect entrepreneurs who've been through the ups and downs of a tech startup to have an advantage over the newcomers. Or at least have an equal chance at success. But in fact the opposite may be true. A number of venture capitalists I've spoken with have said that too many "old guard" entrepreneurs are not being bold enough in their business decisions, and it's hurting their startups.

I never made lots of money at it, but I sold enough.

I've been part of founding three companies that have gone public. It doesn't seem like a big number, but it's actually a lot.

Despite what some investors say, older age is an advantage in the startup world. You know more about industries and markets, and have ideas for products that the world actually needs and a better ability to motivate and manage than a kid out of school does.

Mitt Romney has a proven job creation record as governor and in the private sector.

I'm not interested in thinking up the name of a band and a logo and all that. Been there, done that, sold a million T-shirts.

We've talked with over a dozen VCs and angel investors over the years. But we've never clicked with any of them until Andreessen. During our initial meeting, we were bouncing ideas around about where Imgur could go.

I tell aspiring entrepreneurs all the time: Validate your idea locally. Get some experience under your belt. Prove your idea has legs where you are. Spend some time as a big fish in a small pond. Demonstrate that there's a there there... there. Where you live.

As one of the first employees at a small cellular phone start-up called Nextel, I gained firsthand experience in how a business grows from an idea to a company that, at its peak, employed many thousands.

I wouldn't call Loopt a failure. It didn't turn out like I wanted, for sure, but it was fun, I learned a lot, and I made enough money to start investing, which led me to my current job. I don't regret it at all.

Great VCs are more than mere investors; they are often seasoned leaders who have built companies themselves.

I was just a kid selling monster stories to the kids in the projects, complete with a dramatic reading, making the werewolf sounds. My career was aborted early on because one of my main customers started to have nightmares and his mother came to my mother and my mother shut down my whole business.

Obviously in a work capacity I've been tremendously busy running The Trump Organization now that my father's on the campaign trail and my own company and the growth of that. So it's been an amazing time, a wild experience, and an incredible one.

Even if you have no interest in starting a company, having the experience of having ideas and doing them, that's muscle to exercise because that's what people are going to want to see. That's what makes you different.

The hardest thing was launching 'OK!' magazine; the easiest thing was Channel 5. 'The Express' was my defining moment because our turnover was less than £100m with 150 employees.

If you look at the ecosystem, entrepreneurs as a class have gotten younger, younger, and younger. They also as a class have become less and less and less experienced. The good part about that is that you're unlocking this ability to start a company to so many more people. That's an amazing positive. The negative is they're coming to that job with dramatically less experience than they've ever had. So there needs to be someone around the table that can then help them.

At thirty-five, having spent over twenty years running varied businesses for my family, I decided to sit down and write my first novel. I had never written anything longer than a couple of pages till then and was foolishly attempting to write a hundred-thousand words.