Entrepreneurs

"I think the entrepreneurial spirit is still alive and kicking. I hope it never ever dies, because I think when it does, the world dies."

"Entrepreneurs are artists and I mean “artists” in the true sense of the word: they see something no one else does."

"Product/market fit is the holy grail for entrepreneurs."

"Normal people expect to be recognized for what they do. Entrepreneurs make their own recognition and create their own reality."

"I think that people have the idea of an entrepreneur being the sort of stereotype person who treads all over everybody and bullies their way to the top. There certainly are people like that, and they have managed to get away with it, but they generally get their come-uppance in the end."

"To any potential entrepreneur I would say, don't go with the wave; find something unique."

"I don’t believe there are any free lunches. There is no easy ride to success. The journey is what it is and you have to accept that if you want to be a successful entrepreneur."

"Let’s free entrepreneurs to do what they do best – innovate, grow, and hire."

"The true entrepreneur is one who thinks laterally, about how to make a second business out of the first."

"I see an entrepreneur as the chief designer of a business that works better than any other."

"[T]he entrepreneur is the focal point at which the dynamic forces... materialize into action for economic progress. The entrepreneur doesn't really respond primarily to the profit motive... entrepreneur and investor—are often not... the same person. Neither does the entrepreneur seek power... management and entrepreneur are not necessarily one. Nor do Veblenesque social status or Weberian Protestant righteousness seem to be the main motives... Rather, he seems to be the adventurer, a pioneer, an artist sculpting in economic clay. ...Is the dynamic force that sustains the industrialized economic system... an irrational spirit..? Many economists... postulate the existence of an "economic man," who rationally and objectively computes... and makes a decision that will maximize perofits. ...[T]his imaginary construct is the dynamic implicitly assumed for almost all of the economic theories from the late 1800s to the present. ...[T]hey continue to use it because without economic man most of their theories would be invalidated."

"For too long, enterprise has been defined in quite narrow terms—a vague notion of business start-ups. This definition has confined the study of the subject to the fringes—a kind of strange novelty, or a bolt-on to other subjects."

"The entrepreneur is the person who seeks to identify what consumers, at home or abroad or both, want and would be willing to buy at a profitable price. These entrepreneurs are the job-creators because it is they who gather the men and women, the material, the machinery, and the money to turn the vision of a market into a reality."

"If you look at the typical profile of entrepreneurs, they have changed a lot. The startup companies today have pretty much been the people who survived in a very tough, Darwinian environment. It’s really a one-in-a-million thing."

"Brilliant minds are applying technology to world's toughest problems."

"Napoleon said Britain is a nation of shopkeepers and a shopkeeper is an entrepreneur—he or she is a small business person. That’s exactly what we are."

"If your aspirations are not greater than your resources, you’re not an entrepreneur."

"We have seen that the function of entrepreneurs is to reform or revolutionize the pattern of production by exploiting an invention or, more generally, an untried technological possibility for producing a new commodity or producing an old one in a new way, by opening up a new source of supply of materials or a new outlet for products, by reorganizing an industry and so on. ...To undertake such new things is difficult and constitutes a distinct economic function, first, because they lie outside the routine tasks... and secondly, because the environment resists in many ways... from simple refusal either to finance or to buy a new thing, to physical attack on the man who tries to produce it. To act with confidence beyond the range of familiar beacons and to overcome that resistance requires aptitudes that are present in only a small fraction of the population and that define the entrepreneurial type as well as the entrepreneurial function. This function does not essentially consist in either inventing anything or otherwise creating the conditions which the enterprise exploits. It consists of getting things done."

"In this world people remember you for the things you do for others rather than for yourself."

"An entrepreneur is very enthusiastic and dances to a different drum beat, but never considers success as something which equates to personal wealth."

"We [entrepreneurs] have incredible enthusiasm, and I think part of the success of any entrepreneur is energy. Entrepreneurs have this real belief that their lives are about service and leadership."