Categories:
- Rallying the Team
- Personal Success
- Thoughts on Innovation
- Overcoming Challenges
- Conquering Fear
- Dealing with Failure
- Ins and Outs of Entrepreneurship
Ins and Outs of Entrepreneurship
The power of compound interest is the 8th wonder of the world.
If I’m the smartest guy in the room, I’m in the wrong room.
Nothing is easy. If you want to do nothing, that’s easy.
It’s so much easier to do something new than to do something well.
At the opening of the Hoover Dam, a beaver told a rabbit: ‘Well, I didn’t build it. But it’s based on my idea.
An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.
Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.
It’s not a good strategy until it costs you something to pursue.
I don’t try to reinvent the wheel. I just try to change the spokes.
I just invent, then wait until man comes around to needing what I’ve invented.
To understand a company, spend time with its customers.
Be careful – a little success can create a whole lot of overhead.
Make sure that the best thing to happen to your customer today is you.
Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.
Make no little plans.
Being early and being wrong are sometimes not that different.
Good enough never is.
An entrepreneur is someone who shoots an arrow and then runs to move the target, so the arrow hits it.
Innovation is seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.
Much good work is lost for the lack of a little more.
The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything.
You can’t really run the company by pissing off the scientists who do the work.
Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.
We simply attempt to be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy only when others are fearful.
It’s not necessary to do extraordinary things to get extraordinary results.
Rule No. 1: Never lose money. Rule No. 2: Never forget rule No. 1.
You’ll see it when you believe it.
The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the entrepreneur adjusts the sails.
If this is a blessing, it is certainly very well disguised.
Strategy – is figuring out what is the most important thing for your company and deciding to focus on it and say no to everything else.
There’s only one boss: the customer. He can fire everybody from the chairman on down simply by spending his money elsewhere.
Outstanding leaders go out of their way to boost the self-esteem of their personnel. If people believe in themselves it’s amazing what they can accomplish.
If you don’t listen to your customers, someone else will.
Customers don’t want 1/4 drills, they want 1/4 holes.
With Early Stage companies, it’s never one thing. It’s always one thing after another.
If you have an important point to make, don’t try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time – a tremendous whack.
Be ready to revise any system, scrap any method, and abandon any theory, if the success of the job requires it.
To do a common thing, uncommonly well, brings success.
Choice is the enemy of decision.
Learn from the mistakes of others. You can never live long enough to make them all yourself.
If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.
More startups die of indigestion than starvation.
I believe that smart people working hard will eventually get lucky.
If you have no idea how something is supposed to be done, I guarantee you’ll be disruptive. Let what you don’t know become your greatest asset.
One can learn to cook, but a restaurateur is born.
Partners don’t pay each other, they help each other get paid.
Entrepreneurship exists in the tiny space between madness and genius; and, its journey requires a few cross border violations across both madness and genius to get to the final destination.
I’m sure that you’re trying to challenge yourself to invent something new. That’s impossible.
A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.
On ne règne sur les âmes que par le calme. (One leads by calm.)
We’re not trying to entertain the critics… I’ll take my chances with the public.
In economics, things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then happen faster than you thought they could.
You can’t innovate once.
To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.
Having money is no reason to spend it.
I’ve made a lot of mistakes. I don’t have a lot of regrets.
Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their labor: If either of them falls down, one can help the other up. But pity anyone who falls and has no one to help them up.
Dad always used to say, ‘Tell me a fact, and I’ll learn. Tell me a truth, and I’ll believe. But tell me a story, and it will live in my heart forever.’
Feed the strong, starve the weak. Lead with your strength and avoid protecting the weak – weak brands, weak products and weak people. Know your strengths and lead with them.
I don’t know what the price is, but the price knows what the price is.
Deliberately obsolete your product. Do this by raising expectations for the category and ‘reinventing’ your brand in the eyes of the consumer. Nothing puts more pressure on a competitor.
Many things are improbable, only a few are impossible.
To be persuasive, we must be believable. To be believable, we must be credible. To be credible, we must be truthful.
I see the light when I feel the heat.
There are only two problems in business: 1. Not enough orders. 2. Not enough capacity to ship the orders.
95% of Initial Coin Offerings give the rest a bad name.
Great advertising can make food taste better, can make your car run smoother.
When the rate of change outside exceeds the rate of change inside, the end is in sight.
The meek shall inherit the earth – but not its mineral rights.
Profit gives us resources.
A leader’s job is to have all the questions. You have to be incredibly comfortable looking like the dumbest person in the room.
No amount of advertising can force any large number of people to buy things they do not want. Advertising can only create a new market for products which fill a genuine – though often unexpressed or latent – consumer want.
If you don’t have a business, what do you do for aggravation?
If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.
Advertising cannot sell a poor product. It might induce people to try it once. But it cannot build an enduring business on such a product.
Change before you have to.
Learn to sell and you will never starve.
The job of tech transfer manager is to make something happen – without getting fired.
One of the hardest truths for any technologist to hear is that success or failure in business is rarely determined by the quality of the technology.
I hate any advertisement that pretends to know me. You’re not my friend. You’re a company.
Innovation is the only insurance against irrelevance; the only guarantee of long-term customer loyalty.
The four most important words in business are ‘What do you think?’
Smart MFs sound like Crazy MFs to Dumb MFs.
The amount of money start-ups raise in their seed and Series A rounds is inversely correlated with success. Yes, I mean that. Less money raised leads to more success.
The most dangerous phrase in the language is ‘We’ve always done it this way.’
Our mission is to delight people who appreciate quality of life.
Corporations don’t have morals.
I don’t want a lawyer who tells me what I can’t do. I hire a lawyer to tell me how to do what I want to do!
Purpose motivates employees better than profit. They are proud if they can say, ‘Our company is making the world cleaner, the food healthier.’
Until we have an exit, we Angel investors are just donors.
There’s no business not like show business.
Start working with your prospects as if they’ve already hired you.
The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.
Advertising is art serving capitalism.
I don’t like investors. When you take money, you’re typically setting the stage to get out. It’s about multiples and math at that point. It’s not about product. It’s not about customers. It’s just about growth. And that, to me, is a perverted sense of what business is about. Business to me is about making something great, treating your employee’s great, treating your customer’s great, adding something good to the world that wasn’t there before.
Complaining is not a strategy.
I think strategic planning is the antithesis of building a corporation.
A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of.
Nobody cares about your product, service or solution. All they care about is the difference you can make for their organization.
Angels who won’t conduct postmortems climb the ladder of success wrong by wrong.
Entrepreneurs’ genius is the gold in the mine; angels are miners helping to extract it; VCs are claim jumpers.
Developers will fill the world with empty buildings – if you pay them to do it.
Success is an accident … well placed.
When assessing ‘first mover advantage’ remember that mousetraps demonstrate the wisdom of being the second mouse.
Raising your first VC round can be like bobbing for piranhas.
Building a great company is necessary but insufficient for building a great investment.
Failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent you have to experiment.
Face-to-face contact will give you the edge over your competitors every time.
History has shown that incumbents tend to fight trends that challenge established ways and, in the process, lose focus on what matters most: customers. Customers always win.
If you take comfort in anti-dilution clauses you probably believe in lifetime guarantees.
Problems don’t age well.
People fire themselves.
I worship entrepreneurs. They do more than anyone thinks is possible – with less than anyone thinks is possible.
If you have perfect customer analytics, you will know how to find people who look like your current customer. But if you focus only on them, you will never get any new business.
After you ask a closing question, SHUT UP! The next person who speaks loses.
Working a little harder to keep a customer now is a lot smarter than working a lot harder later to get a new customer.
Startup companies don’t do better just because you throw more money at them.
The four most dangerous words in investing are: This time it’s different.
Many angels have seen more deals than they can remember. Some remember more homeruns than they have seen.
For some entrepreneurs it’s better to be never than late.
Think like an entrepreneur. Create like an innovator. Perform like a teammate.
Talk low, talk slow and don’t say too much.
Proving it will be a homerun ahead of the swing is impossible! You have to try for a hit first and sometimes it turns into a homerun.
Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is, I don’t know which half.
If you can’t be kind, at least be vague.
Expedite the inevitable.
Objects have their own world. Making an object means imbuing it with its own spirit.
Purpose is not the sole pursuit of profits, but the animating force for achieving them.
The main thing is keeping the main thing the main thing.
But that is what fashion is about, when you look at something, and you aren’t sure if you like it or not.
Neatness rejects involvement.
Purpose is not a mere tagline or marketing campaign, it is a company’s fundamental reason for being.
In my next life, I will try to commit more errors.
The seven smartest words in the English language are: ‘I don’t know, but I’ll find out.’
You can fool all the people all of the time – if the advertising is right and the budget is big enough.
People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
It’s one thing to be wrong about the valuation. It’s another to be wrong about the business model.
There’s no decision you should ever make that would embarrass you if it became public.
Someone needs to do something about this.
Trying to come up with a great idea is not a great idea. Go for quantity over quality.
We’re not funding Mother Teresa. We’re funding imperial, will-to-power people who want to crush their competition.
It’s so much easier to suggest solutions when you don’t know too much about the problem.
The first person you lead is you.
Every time I look at my yacht, I think of the 30X exits on one of my investments. I don’t have a yacht.
My advice on firing is simple. Treat that person the same way you’d want to be treated if you were in that situation. They’re still a good person, just not the right fit.
Integrity is a binary state. You either have it or you don’t
If you don’t know where you’re going, any road’ll take you there.
Wonder what your customer really wants? Ask. Don’t tell.
The rational and the irrational complement each other. Individually, they are far less valuable.
It is very hard to find any evidence which shows that a focus on maximizing shareholder value actually maximizes shareholder value.
We were given some great advice early on: Strategy is what you don’t do. Whenever we do anything, we ask ourselves, ‘Is this true to Warby Parker?’
The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low and achieving our mark.
A business exists to create a customer.
After 35 years, there is not a shred of evidence that stock-based compensation by company officers is correlated with company performance.
The harder I work, the luckier I get!
Innovation often originates outside existing organizations, in part because successful organizations acquire a commitment to the status quo and a resistance to ideas that might change it.
Investing is about meeting people’s needs.
An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.
Never mistake a clear view for a short distance.
Listening to advice often accomplishes far more than heeding it.
The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.
The less money you need, the harder it is to run out.
A man with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.
Organizations resist innovation because people are more comfortable with what they know than what they don’t.
Price is what you pay, value is what you get.
Failing is good as long as it doesn’t become a habit.
Anyone who has ever taken a shower has had a great idea.
A joint venture is two parties in the same bed with different dreams.
This way to the egress.
You can’t demand a withdrawal from someone you have not invested in.
You can’t talk yourself out of a problem you’ve behaved yourself into. You must behave yourself out!
If you’ve gotten to the point where you are thinking it might be time to think about replacing the founder, its past time to replace the founder.
There’s a price to pay for the price you pay.
Done is better than perfect.
A recent study found that intense tedium is a major contributing factor in the desire for an early death. I just made that up. But I’ll be we could pay for research that would find that.
The best sales professionals are experts in and advocates for their buyers. They won’t represent companies they don’t believe in. They won’t get on a call without being prepared to make the most of their and their prospect’s time. They know how to leverage every technology, colleague and contact to augment their skills in order to produce optimal outcomes. They welcome coaching, exercise discipline with their time, do their homework and win for the team. They are true athletes.
We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.
Even if the situation or challenge is very complex, usually the simplest solution is the one to go with.
You cannot control cattle at a high rate of speed. They have the capacity to tire out and just stand there, and they will not move. Slow is fast – cattle don’t wear a wristwatch.
If you‘re the smartest person in the room, you haven’t hired well.
Whether individuals or organizations, we follow those who lead not because we have to, but because we want to. We follow those who lead not for them, but for ourselves.
You don’t go broke making small profits.
The business of America, it turns out, is not business. It’s monetizing what is in our heads.
The future is like a Japanese game show. You have no idea what’s going on.
Big companies are amazing at coming up with reasons not to do things.
Facts tell. Stories sell.
The things that come to those that wait may be the things left by those that got there first.
Decide what your [company] purpose is and write it down. That way, you won’t lie to yourself.
If I can’t make money in the $5 trillion U.S. market, it may be a little bit of wishful thinking to think that all I have to do is get a few thousand miles offshore and I’ll start showing my stuff.
You can’t make a good deal with a bad person.
Solving big problems is easier than solving little problems.
Content is king but context is the kingdom.
Proofread carefully to see if you any words out.
A financier is a pawnbroker with imagination.
Typos in your presentation tell your investors how carefully you plan to manage their money.
Being a great entrepreneur is doing all the things you love to do on the days you don’t feel like doing them.
No nationwas ever ruined by trade.
Our company is guided by three deeply held beliefs: That brands with purpose grow, companies with purpose last and people with purpose thrive.
The best audience is intelligent, well-educated and a little drunk.
When you need money, go ask for advice. When you need advice, go ask for money.
The biggest thing about negotiating: You’ve got to make sure you’re trying to construct a good deal for them.
Take my factories and my money but leave me my salesmen and I’ll be back where I was in two years.
The customer of my customer is my customer.
A principle isn’t worth anything if it doesn’t cost you.
It’s not success you want to be remembered for, but significance.
Better salesperson always beats better product.
I often tell would-be entrepreneurs that you have to be a little crazy or even masochistic to choose this life. The energy, endurance, optimism and just plain thick skin required aren’t for the faint of heart.
The public wants what it can’t get.
If you are going to doubt something, doubt your limits.
Done equals good.
A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.
All of Wendy’s spins off one fresh word – FRESH
If you watch entrepreneurs long enough, you observe that innovation is typically a ground game, not a Hail Mary pass.
I look for businesses in which I think I can predict what they’re going to look like in ten to fifteen years’ time.