Entrepreneurial Risk Quotes

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.

Failure is a big part of a free market's success. People fail to live up to their potential, or to carry out all their good intentions, in all kinds of economic and political systems. Capitalism makes them pay a price for their failures, while socialism, feudalism, fascism and other systems enable personal failures, especially by those at the top, to be ignored.

Now I have a business, artists to take care of. I want to make sure everything's going right, because at the end of the day, it's my name.

Every business makes big mistakes along the way.

I think small business is struggling in New York City. It's a fantastic market, it's a very appealing market, there's lots of opportunity, at the same time it's a very difficult place to build a small business.

Every time a twenty-something CEO turns down a multibillion-dollar offer for a company that has little or no revenues, it hits a raw nerve in me. Unlike most professionals, I am not shocked by the seemingly bizarre behavior of those founders who pursue their vision beyond all rational thought or monetary reward.

In the startup world, 'not working' is normal.

And those of us who have business opportunities and the capital to do it are going to sit in fear of the President. And a lot of people don't want to say that. They'll say, God, don't be attacking Obama. Well, this is Obama's deal and it's Obama that's responsible for this fear in America.

I reckon I closed down at least two films companies, one of which was in Ealing in the mid 1950s.

First of all, every new company today is being built in the face of massive economic headwinds, making the challenge far greater than it was in the relatively benign '90s.

You must get your living by loving. But as it is said of the merchants that ninety-seven in a hundred fail, so the life of men generally, tried by this standard, is a failure, and bankruptcy may be surely prophesied.

We realized we weren't really using Odeo, we weren't investing our own time creating podcasts. We were building a tool that was a great idea for some other people. That's a dangerous way to go because if you don't actually use it yourself and love it, then you aren't going to be as fully invested in it from the start. That's what leads you to doing side projects.

If you want your company to succeed, you have to have the confidence in your business to take a bet on its future - to risk destroying a mediocre business model for the chance to have a strong one.

If Edison was worried about his candle customers, he would have never invented the light bulb.

As quickly as it started, our business model evaporated. But while Traf-O-Data was technically a business failure, the understanding of microprocessors we absorbed was crucial to our future success.

Believing your own bullshit is always a perilous activity, but never more fatal than for the owner of a start-up venture.

The natural state of a start-up is to die; most start-ups require multiple miracles in their early days to escape this fate.

When I started my company, many people said I shouldn't launch it as a retail concept because it was too big a risk. They told me to launch as a wholesaler to test the waters - because that was the traditional way.

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.

A hardware startup with no funding is a risky venture.

There's a lot of glorification of startups and being a founder. People brush the failures under the rug, but that's the worst thing you can do. You kind of have to face it head on.

Entrepreneurs are accustomed to accountability: If we fail to deliver value, we lose customers. If we misallocate capital, we absorb the loss. Government, too, should be judged by results, not intentions.

Being bootstrapped is great. You own 100 percent of it. But the downside is that you aren't able to move as fast as you want.

I've made mistakes in business, but none so big I couldn't recover and learn from them. The more you try to change consumer behaviour, the riskier it gets. You have to work out your potential losses against the obvious gains.

I started Shutterstock without any outside funding; I believe in creating a lean startup. By not taking outside investors early, I was forced to use every dollar I had as efficiently as possible. And I was able to keep a large part of the company.