Discover the most popular and inspiring quotes and sayings on the topic of Founders. Share them with your friends on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, and let the world be inspired by their powerful messages. Here are the Top 100 Founders Quotes And Sayings by 75 Authors including Ursula Burns,Jay Samit,Michael Moritz,Irv Robbins,Sam Altman for you to enjoy and share.
Unlike people, companies outlive their founders and their leaders.
Founders need sizable egos to believe that what they are creating is good enough to change the world. What makes for great co-founders is having those egos focused on complementary, not competing, skills.
There's nothing more invigorating than being deeply involved with a small company and a young team of founders out to do something incredibly special.
You look at any giant corporation, and I mean the biggies, and they all started with a guy with an idea, doing it well.
For the top twenty most valuable YC companies, all of them have at least two founders.
However small a company, its founders should try to expand people's opportunities and choices.
Most Fortune 500 companies began as small start-ups whose entrepreneurial founders slowly developed the infrastructure, hired the staff, sourced manufacturers or built their own factory, and created distribution, sales, and marketing plans.
Entrepreneurs are perennially short on cash, so they tend to hire less expensive and less experienced team members. Yet most founders are overworked, so they have no time and budget for coaching and training. Team members not confident in their roles lose motivation quickly.
Losing focus is another way that founders get off track.
As a founder you have to build a team some day, so why not start the day you found the company?
As one of the first employees at a small cellular phone start-up called Nextel, I gained firsthand experience in how a business grows from an idea to a company that, at its peak, employed many thousands.
The biggest start-up successes - from Henry Ford to Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg - were pioneered by people from solidly middle-class backgrounds. These founders were not wealthy when they began. They were hungry for success, but knew they had a solid support system to fall back on if they failed.
The research that Noam Wasserman has assembled here can help entrepreneurial companies who want to prepare well for their future. The Founder's Dilemmas is a must-read for anyone thinking about starting a business.
The more we see the founders as humans the more we can understand them.
I mean I wasn't a founder in the sense that I contributed anything scientifically but in the sense that I signed the corporation papers and, and owned founder's stock.
Leaders: Captains of industry.
I am the CEO and co-founder of Purpose - a social movement incubator and agency. We work on ways to help millions of people combine their power as citizens, consumers and cultural agents.
Great companies with the way they work, first start with great leaders.
Jeremy Stoppelman started Yelp. Max Levchin started Slide. I started LinkedIn. It was a mininova explosion of folks jumping out to doing other entrepreneurial activities.
Pick a co-founder that communicates in the same fashion that you do. If you are a screamer, then the only way you will ever listen to a conflicting point of view is to find someone who is passionate enough to yell back at you.
And the great owners, who had become through the might of their holdings both more and less than men
One thing that founders always underestimate is how hard it is to recruit.
You have to be intense. This only comes from the CEO, this only comes from the founders.
Building a startup community is not a zero-sum game in which there are winners and losers: if everyone engages, they and the entire community can all be winners.
As a founder, your first job is to get the first things right, because you cannot build a great company on a flawed foundation.
Great companies in the way they work, start with great leaders.
The best founders are extremely thoughtful and have an eye for quality. I don't know if there's any generic advice here that would be helpful. Startup knowledge is a moving target.
Thiel rejects the small-mindedness of most of the Valley's entrepreneurialism. The motto of Founders Fund is: "We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters." But
It's an amazing time to be a female founder.
Startups are the engines of exponential growth, manifesting the power of innovation. Several big companies today are startups of yesterday. They were born with a spirit of enterprise and adventure kept alive due to hardwork and perseverance and today have become shining beacons of innovation.
Startups, in some sense, have gotten so easy to start that we are confusing two things. And what we are confusing, often, is, 'How far can you get in your first day of travel?' with, 'How long it is going to take to get up to the top of the mountain?'
It's a special person - and personality - who can lead a start-up to soaring success and sustain that success for the long term. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg are star examples.
CEO of People Incorporated,
The origins of great companies inevitably start with the ideas and enterprise of great men.
The companies I have traditionally seen do best over the long term had lead investors for their seed rounds
Beware angel investors: they can be disruptive.
When you're in a startup, the first ten people will determine whether the company succeeds or not.
For all founders, going public is a momentous milestone that has to be experienced to be fully understood. It is the culmination of years of hard work and personal sacrifice.
One of the top causes of startup death - right after cofounder problems - is building something no one wants.
Behind good brands lie stakeholder companies.
We pretty much won't fund a company now where the founders don't have vested equity because it's just that hard to do.
Whatever the founder cares about, whatever the founders think are the key goals, that's going to be what the whole company focusses on.
If you ask a founder how their company is doing, they always say, 'Oh it's great. We're totally crushing it,' and that's almost never true.
A founder who is in for the short run, or has no passion for the sector he is in, doesn't give me a great deal of comfort.
The Curbside founders are successful entrepreneurs, who each have sold their companies to Apple.
All the biggest companies are based on a founder who had a need, hacked it together, and said, 'Hey, other people might want this.'
Before 20 or 25 employees, most companies are structured with everyone reporting to the founder. It's totally flat.
We only hear success stories. You don't hear about the hundreds and hundreds - the overwhelming majority that don't go anywhere. This is a more realistic portrayal of what happens in startups.
What we believe at Founders Fund is that technology is a way to help everybody on the planet.
We often work with young first-time founders at TechStars. Most of them have bought into the myth that you have to work constantly in order to succeed. We think you just have to work productively, and there's a huge difference. To
If a founder has passion and innovation, he needs to be supported. I am more intuitive than a numbers person, and I recognise that not all investments are going to be positive. Some may fail, and some may have problems for other reasons. That is life.
A founder's perspective is unique.
Entrepreneurs are builders, and the lens through which I view Starbucks and the marketplace is somewhat different from what it would be if I were a professionally schooled manager.
In the space of three weeks, I met a fair bunch of the guys who were just starting those little programmers' co-ops, and everybody was talking about starting businesses.
Great businessmen are creators.
When I came to the United States in 2004 to attend university at Stanford, I was instantly inspired by the stories and advice from startup leaders in Silicon Valley and beyond, who had endeavoured to create new opportunities and improve lives around the world.
Before I started Code for America, I spent my career around startups. First it was game developers, small teams trying to make hits in a tough business. Then, when I started working on the Web 2.0 events, it was web startups during times of enormous opportunity and investment.
RUTHERFORD PIERCE TO LEAD REPORTERS ON TOUR OF FOUNDERS MEDIA HEADQUARTERS SITE IN DOWNTOWN BOSTON.
Most phenomenal startup teams create businesses that ultimately fail. Why? They built something that nobody wanted.
Sometimes people think Y Combinator has big ideas about themes. But really, we just fund the best startups.
The thing that kills startups at some level, is the founders giving up.
Show me a first-generatio n fortune and I'll show you a successful partnership between a talented individual and society's invisible venture capitalist, the commons.
But those start-up founders don't hide their failures; to the contrary, they flaunt them - blogging about them, gathering to talk about them at conferences like FailCon.
We're supposed to be an entrepreneurial company; we're meant to be expanding and looking for opportunities - but the minute you do it, you get your head bashed in.
The media often glamorizes successful founders and makes their paths seem easier than they actually were.
In YC's case, the number one cause of early death for startups is cofounder blowups.
My parents were both entrepreneurs.
All throughout my life I have been deeply immersed in startups, either because I was running one or investing in them or helping them.
Mike Krieger and I started talking, and he decided he liked the idea of helping start the company. Once he joined, we took a step back and looked at the product as it stood.
When I was planning LearnVest, everyone told me I had to talk to Ann Kaplan, one of the first female partners at Goldman Sachs. Within five minutes of our meeting, she totally got the idea - and by the time I left, she was a seed investor.
I get a lot of criticism for telling founders to focus first on making something great, instead of worrying about how to make money. And yet that is exactly what Google did. And Apple, for that matter. You'd think examples like that would be enough to convince people.
These stewards of the company way are the intellectual and emotional foundation of the organization.
I do think a founder has special permission to make sweeping changes across an organization.
There were some entrepreneurial du Ponts that are a little different from the heads of the corporations today.
Successful startups are just like jazz bands, masters of improvisation marching to syncopated beats
Great companies start because the founders want to change the world ... not make a fast buck.
Our co-founder and company president, Jim Levy, came from a record industry background and understood the marketing and promotion of artists as well as products. So the video game business went from absolutely zero designer credit to something approaching rock star promotion.
When you have a programmer-founded company it often gets really techy, if you have a producer or a business-person, it all really sets the flavor of the company, just the priorities and the way you deal with everything.
The initial organisation, we called ourselves the Network Working Group, consisted of 6 to 10 people. We then quickly grew to 30 people and then to 50 people.
I had one simple idea about telling friends about arts and technology events. People in the community suggested everything else to us, and that's our theme. We're really run by the people who use the site. We just run the infrastructure, and help out with problems.
The typical entrepreneur is no longer the bold and tireless man of Marshall, or the sly and rapacious Moneybags of Marx, but a mass of inert shareholders, indistinguishable from rentiers, who employ salaried managers to run their concerns.
World-changing startups need to be premised on accurate contrarian theories.
Startups don't starve; they drown." There
Most startups are not just built for the person who is using them. When you do that, every now and then you get really lucky and ... are representative of some huge class of people who all want the same thing you do ... but very often that just turns into a side project that doesn't go anywhere.
I founded Minted in 2007 with the desire to use 'crowd-sourcing' to bring designs from the best emerging and independent designers in the world to consumers.
Even as entrepreneurs, we rely on people to get things done. We may have the original idea, but moving it forward can involve hundreds of people. Every person becomes integral to the overall success.
I started my first company when I was in my college dorm as a senior with two of my really good friends. We started a company that became SparkNotes. You know CliffsNotes? SparkNotes is a modern-day version of that.
Many entrepreneurs that made their fortunes by founding successful technology companies want to give back and solve the world's biggest problems on a grand scale. There is tremendous opportunity in this approach.
Entrepreneurs are the forgotten heroes of America.
When I talk to entrepreneurs today, I feel like the grandfather who was in the Civil War.
These are the bozos. They are graspers and self-promoters, shameless resume padders, people who describe themselves as "product marketing professionals," "growth hackers," "creative rockstar interns," and "public speakers.
Life inside successful Web startups - especially the really successful ones - can be nasty, brutish, and short. As companies grow exponentially, egos clash, investors jockey for control, and business complexities rapidly exceed the managerial abilities of the founders.
I am thoroughly enjoying spending the majority of my time with entrepreneurs. I find that their enthusiasm, dedication, willingness to take huge risks and desire to make a dramatic impact quite inspiring.
A leader can create a company, but a community creates a movement,
Most people are average. Founders are not. Founders' traits seem to have an inverse normal distribution to them.
Keeping a 'CEO blog' or 'founder's blog' can be a great platform for engaging your users in a nontraditional way, reaching people outside of your product pitch and building rapport without selling them anything except a belief in your ideas.
Look - this is the terror of being a founder & CEO. It is all your fault. Every decision, every person you hire, every dumb thing you buy or do - ultimately, you're at the end.
The grim reality is that most start-ups fail. Most new products are not successful. Yet the story of perseverance, creative genius, and hard work persists.
I am a partner at CrunchFund, a venture capital firm with investments in many startups around the world. I am also a limited partner in many other venture funds which have their own startup investments.
It's better to have no cofounder than to have a bad cofounder, but it's still bad to be a solo founder.
Every successful business, even Google, Facebook, Twitter, started with a combination of manual improvements and friends of the founders using the site.