Startup Challenges Quotes

I had so many people try to talk me out of starting a rocket company, it was crazy.

In a startup, there have to be challenges. Otherwise, someone else would have done it already. And that's almost the most exciting part.

The bad thing about young people starting a company is that sometimes they do it for the wrong reasons or because they have the wrong skill set, but the good thing is that they don't have any of the old paradigms baked into them, so they have a lot of the bright new ideas that are harder to come by as you get older.

Starting a business is risky. Half of all new businesses fail to experience a fifth anniversary. And everyone knows that you could lose all the money you've invested in your new company and then some. Those are the obvious risks of trying to be an entrepreneur.

In general don't start a startup you're not willing to work on for ten years.

Most of what I learned as an entrepreneur was by trial and error.

Entrepreneurship is “risky” mainly because so few of the so-called entrepreneurs know what they are doing.

Hopefully, I can advise entrepreneurs to avoid mistakes. But you can never be sure if you're trying something new and unreasonable.

When you're starting a new business, you don't need to know much about it. A lot of the work is blocking and tackling - it's the same type of stuff no matter what sector you're in.

The more successful the unit, the more difficult it is to make sure that the large company doesn't put the same expectations on it as it does for the rest of the company. When it's a new venture, whether it's outside or inside the business, it's a child. And you don't put a 40-pound pack on a 6-year-old's back when you take her hiking.

How can you get fired from the company you started?

Even entrepreneurs with the best ideas sometimes need a little wind beneath their wings.

Thinking about starting a small business? Assume everything will cost twice as much and take twice as long as you think it will.

When we first started our internet company, 'China Pages', in 1995, and we were just making home pages for a lot of Chinese companies. We went to the big owners, the big companies, and they didn't want to do it. We go to state-owned companies, and they didn't want to do it. Only the small and medium companies really want to do it.

You need that hunger no matter what, because eventually the honeymoon period wears off. Somewhere between printing your business cards that say 'founder' on them and everything else you have to do, you realize, 'Oh, actually this is a ton of work.'

Accessing capital to start a business can be a daunting process, especially for entrepreneurs who start out with a great idea, but have no real familiarity with the business world.

Failure will happen. It's a normal part of the startup process.

Starting a business from scratch and having little money in the bank focuses your mind in a way that running a multibillion-dollar business never does. It brings the key drivers of performance into sharp relief. I promise.

That's a problem. I mean, like any sort of growing startup organization, we are sort of overwhelmed by our growth. And that means we're getting enormous quantity of whistleblower disclosures of a very high caliber, but don't have enough people to actually process and vet this information.

Most founders have not managed people before, and they certainly haven't managed managers.

You know who a complicated tax code kills? The guy or gal trying to start a business out of the spare bedroom of their home. So we've got to simplify our tax code.

An entrepreneur's life is always a continuous journey.

Part of the entrepreneurial thing is there are lots of ways to die.

Many people who try to do big bold things in the world find out it's not about the money or the technology: It's about the regulatory hurdles that will try and stop you.

I made so many mistakes in running the company so far, basically any mistake you can think of I probably made. I think, if anything, the Facebook story is a great example of how if you're building a product that people love you can make a lot of mistakes