entrepreneur

“You can't spot these people at the beginning of their careers. You can spot them maybe in the middle of their careers. So there has to be past track record of somebody who's intuitive and right over and over again. Once you found that, that's based, based on a…”

“That's when you become an entrepreneur, by the way. It's not when you start building something, you're just a builder then.”

“They, that myth that there's an entrepreneur and there's a company builder and they're different animals is simply wrong. It's the, it's a simply a matter of choice and do you decide to become that?”

“So you ought to wait until you find something that's really worthy of the effort, because you're going to be making a heroic effort in any case, You should find a really big idea addressing a really big opportunity, because then if you win huge, but you also c…”

“Entrepreneurs don't really like taking risk. People who write about them and report on them think they're taking risk, but the person who's actually betting their life really thinks it's going to work, or else why would you bet your life?”

“There is a, I believe a big element of startups where a business function is not the right way to describe an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs aren't experts in business functions as you and I would think about them. Yes, very often they're technical, but the defin…”

“And what entrepreneurs who tell stories will succeed at, is they realize they're not the hero in the story. The audience of their message is the hero in the story. And what they're doing is they're helping that person go on a hero's journey. To co-create a bet…”

“I think it's probably wrong to assume that you're going to get a secondary at the seed stage every once in a while at a series A or series B, typically a series B. And I think it's prudent for an entrepreneur to take some cash off the table. Generally, you kno…”

“So people who have lived tougher lives tend to be a little bit more flexible. So that's why in general foreigners are better entrepreneurs in my opinion. And I, you know, I don't want to overstate it, but you know, they're willing to leave their country, their…”

“I find it entrepreneurs are actually Generally speaking, they're probably one or two standard deviations a little bit better about this because they care more about the outcomes and less about who gets the credit, but inside organizations, how you get promoted…”

“You know, one of the challenges of the whole stock option thing is entrepreneurs and founders think that other people will be as motivated by owning part of the company as they are. They're not, not even close. It's a sort of a prize pool at the end of the gam…”

“So what that really means is the real swing variable in being an entrepreneur is the probability that you will start, not the probability that you will succeed if you start.”

“Even entrepreneurs starting company number four or five, six, You know, this is why they should have, like, a board of directors, and they should have people on their board who are actually, like, very smart and strong-willed who will argue with them, right, a…”

“God, you should have just hired the wrong person first, and then you can learn, you know, you can let them go if it's not a fit, but just get moving. So many people they try and use that saying that carpenters use measure twice, cut once, but they just end up …”

“I find every entrepreneur has that inherent drive where they have to achieve, and even when it's not really necessary to achieve.”

“One of the pieces of advice that I give entrepreneurs is too often what they do is they go, okay, now I need to raise money. So now I'm going to call Reed and say, now I need to raise money. And it's like, well, the really best way to do this is to with a numb…”

“That's the hours entrepreneurs have to work every week. Not 50, but 70. And entrepreneurs do work 70.”

“It's that, that fallacy of like, oh, that one thing I'm not doing is going to unlock all of my, or solve all of my problems, unlock all of the growth. And it's just not true. And the worst thing that can happen is the one time that maybe that silver bullet doe…”

“Particularly if it's your first business, you should be solving a problem you deal with. Because Otherwise, why are you qualified to do that?”

“They're gonna tell you to try to, don't worry about your burn rate, just grow, grow, grow, and I said, that's not in your best interest. They say that because you, they're the ones supplying the money, and eventually, if they need to, they'll do a cram down ro…”

“Often to be successful as an entrepreneur, you get there by not listening. You get there by not listening to the odds, not listening to the doubts, not listening to the critics, and then You succeed. So then you get this very wicked learning environment where …”

“That's the hours entrepreneurs have to work every week. Not 50, but 70, and entrepreneurs do work 70.”

“The mistake many people make is, is they have a business, they make the first million dollars, and now they get into things they know nothing about in too big a way.”

“When you're working for somebody else or relying on other people to You know, pay you or validate you that you never really get the confidence that you can build as an entrepreneur when you're kind of out there making things happen on your own.”

“I think we need to tell our young people that entrepreneurs are heroes. That's the guy who mortgages his house and doesn't have a good night's sleep for four years because he's trying to build something from scratch that has a 10% chance of success. And then i…”

“90% of the entrepreneurs that go public live to regret it, because it's a very different enterprise.”

“Entrepreneurs see a better opportunity and they're not risk takers. They're actually risk avoiders. They see that opportunity, an opportunity to serve somebody, to make a difference, to do a job better for somebody, and in the context of that, they're risk avo…”