Entrepreneurial Thinking Quotes

In a startup car company, everything you do has to be done in a different way than a traditional car company. And the main reason is that all of these big car companies are operating like giant well-oiled machines - you could put a very seasoned executive in, and all he has to do is make sure the machine keeps running.

There was no model how to make a documentary production company work. I figured it out as I went along.

By definition, startups are not constrained by the limits of established company culture. And so they push boundaries and develop new technologies and ways of doing things.

Ideas are the greatest and most crucially practical power on earth.

In the bar and restaurant industry, you're always one idea away from your next quarter-million.

As entrepreneurs, we often get pressured into hiring an industry executive. While it's good to hire people with experience, it can also be a stumbling block because they think about the business the same way everyone else does.

I think sometimes there are negative connotations for those who have a business mind as well as a creative side.

I try to drive my office more as a start-up of ideas.

One of the fun things about venture capital is you are constantly learning new ideas and strategies from one business and then applying them to others.

We know how to build cross-disciplinary teams that are needed to take good ideas and make them great businesses. We're good at nurturing that kind of environment. And I do think that's something that's increasingly recognized in a lot of sectors in the economy.

I think if we had eight or 12 of us in the Senate who came from my business background, you'd see a lot of different things in government.

Startups are all about breaking the rules and changing the 'natural order' of things. So let's do that for Series A terms.

It's a really paradoxical thing. We want to think big, but start small. And then scale fast. People think about trying to build the next Facebook as trying to start where Facebook is today, as a major global presence.

One capability every business is expected to have is the capability to make money. It requires a certain kind of discipline, a certain kind of mindset.

Companies cannot really see beyond their current customer base. They explicitly or implicitly do things to protect their current customers. And the last person to want real change is your customer. This is why most new ideas come from small companies that have nothing to lose.

You have to train people how to be business innovators. If you don't train them, the quality of the ideas that you get in an innovation marketplace is not likely to be high.

People look up to Techstars because they get funded by Techstars; they go through the accelerator. What we do impacts what they do. What we care about we hope has a meta impact on those entrepreneurs and how they think about the world.

Economics as currently presented in textbooks and taught in the classroom does not have much to do with business management, and still less with entrepreneurship.

The ways that you innovate within a franchise are not inconsistent with the ways that you create new franchises.

If you want to be rich, think big, think differently.