Start-up Company Quotes

One of my first investments was $100,000 in a Web-based calendar startup - and I lost every dollar.

In high school, I worked at Abercrombie & Fitch, and once I graduated from business school at USC, I started a company with my partner and had a nine-to-seven job.

I started my entrepreneurial journey right out of college. At the age of 21, I incorporated my first business: a PR firm based in New York City.

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

We, Will Ferrell and I, were approached by Sequoia, which is a big financing firm up in Palo Alto; they do a lot of Internet stuff, and they came to us and said they had an idea for a comedy site, and Will and I were sorta like, 'Yeah, we don't know. It's the Internet, we've seen it come and go.'

And we invested three hundred thousand dollars, became the lead investor and I became Chairman of the Board of Scientific Data Systems, as I was at Intel for a while.

When it came time to take a job, I had the distinction of joining the smallest company of any graduate in my class. I left to become only the fifth full-time employee of HAL, and when I told my father this, you can imagine, it was not the happiest moment in the history of my family.

During the last years of university I started an online business with a couple of friends selling domain names - we started by cybersquatting and then we became a real business. Someone bought us after three years and we made a good deal.

When I was trying to write a novel, I ran out of money, and I was delivering packages on a bicycle. And I finally connected with these guys who started a software company, and almost serendipitously fell into that. I felt like they were goofy guys and that I was a goofy guy.

Prior to the App Store, the chances of that happening, of somebody really young forming a company and in a period of no time really becoming a global provider of a game or something else, it really didn't happen. Now there are these success stories popping up everywhere.

When I set up UTV, my ambitions were quite low.

I ended up working in Michigan for a young company called Sycor out of Michigan, worked there, and that company got bought by Northern Telecom. We became the Bell Northern Research Labs of Northern Telecom.

After six years at Le Cirque, I decided to start my own business. I opened Daniel at 76th Street in May '93.

There are many design companies, but there are few designers who organize their own business and open it up to other designers.

In 1997, I decided to open a salon in Beverly Hills. At that time there were no products for eyebrows, so I developed a line.

Before I ran for office, I ran a game studio.

It was 1999, and we were building a way for college kids to create online profiles for the purpose of sharing... with employers. Oops. I vividly remember the moment I realized my company was going to fail. My co-founder and I were at our wits' end. By 2001, the dot-com bubble had burst, and we had spent all our money.