Entrepreneurship & Business: Startup Quotes

Discover a curated collection of quotes that capture the spirit of starting up: vision, grit, iteration, and customer focus. These lines highlight the realities of building from zero, navigating uncertainty, and learning fast. Useful for founders, operators, and students seeking concise inspiration or perspective for pitches, standups, and strategy sessions. Balanced voices from entrepreneurs, investors, and builders emphasize momentum, disciplined risk-taking, and the power of small wins.

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"Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough"

Mark Zuckerberg, Businessman

Mark Zuckerberg

"You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new"

Steve Jobs, Businessman

Steve Jobs

"Test fast, fail fast, adjust fast"

Tom Peters, Businessman

Tom Peters

"A good idea is about ten percent, and implementation and hard work, and luck is 90 percent"

Guy Kawasaki, Businessman

"Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more of what works. If it works big, others quickly copy it. Then you do something else. The trick is the doing something else"

Leonardo da Vinci, Artist

Leonardo da Vinci

"Our greatest lack is not money for any undertaking, but rather ideas. If the ideas are good, cash will somehow flow to where it is needed"

Robert H. Schuller, Clergyman

Robert H. Schuller

"Move fast with stable infrastructure"

Mark Zuckerberg, Businessman

Mark Zuckerberg

"Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough"

Elon Musk, Businessman

Elon Musk

"But let me tell you what happens when regulations go too far, when they seem to exist only for the purpose of justifying the existence of a regulator. It kills the people trying to start a business"

Marco Rubio, Politician

Marco Rubio

"When I started Netscape, I was brand new out of college, and all the aspects of building a business, like balance sheets and hiring people, were new to me"

Marc Andreessen, Businessman

"The world is changing very fast. Big will not beat small anymore. It will be the fast beating the slow"

Rupert Murdoch, Publisher

"Research your idea. See if there's a demand. A lot of people have great ideas, but they don't know if there's a need for it. You also have to research your competition"

Magic Johnson, Athlete

Magic Johnson

"Venture capitalists are like lemmings jumping on the software bandwagon"

Adam Osborne, Author

"Well, user feedback was excellent. Even when the software didn't work at all, there were few people who were avid users, and there were people who were just sending excellent feedback and excellent ideas"

Shawn Fanning, Businessman

"We had every problems starting a big top could have. The tent fell down on the first day. We had problems getting people into the shows. It was only with the courage and arrogance of youth that we survived!"

Guy Laliberte, Businessman

Guy Laliberte

"For me, the most fun is change or growth. There are definitely elements of both that I like. Launching a business is kind of like a motorboat: You can go very quickly and turn fast"

Tony Hsieh, Businessman

"Small opportunities are often the beginning of great enterprises"

Demosthenes, Statesman

"The worst thing that you can do in terms of bringing a product up to the market is to be two days after someone else has brought a similar product to the international market-It's dead"

Ann Macbeth, Author

"His venture sounds like a banana peel awaiting its victim"

Charlotte Curtis, Journalist

"Well, when you're trying to create things that are new, you have to be prepared to be on the edge of risk"

Michael Eisner, Businessman

"Regulation often helps Big Industry remain entrenched in power. The burdensome costs of complying with any new regulation would be a rounding error for the likes of Facebook and Google, but it might completely destroy a promising start-up poised to challenge their dominance"

Charlie Kirk, Politician

Charlie Kirk

"Finnish companies tend to be very traditional, not taking many risks. Silicon Valley is completely different: people here really live on the edge"

Linus Torvalds, Businessman

Linus Torvalds

"With our technology, with objects, literally three people in a garage can blow away what 200 people at Microsoft can do. Literally can blow it away. Corporate America has a need that is so huge and can save them so much money, or make them so much money, or cost them so much money if they miss it, that they are going to fuel the object revolution"

Steve Jobs, Businessman

Steve Jobs

"To turn really interesting ideas and fledgling technologies into a company that can continue to innovate for years, it requires a lot of disciplines"

Steve Jobs, Businessman

Steve Jobs

"It's hard to tell with these Internet startups if they're really interested in building companies or if they're just interested in the money. I can tell you, though: If they don't really want to build a company, they won't luck into it. That's because it's so hard that if you don't have a passion, you'll give up"

Steve Jobs, Businessman

Steve Jobs

"Getting things done in this country, if you want to build something, if you want to start a company, it's getting to be virtually impossible with all of the bureaucracy and all of the approvals"

Donald Trump, Businessman

Donald Trump

"My task over the last two years hasn't just been to stop the bleeding. My task has also been to try to figure out how do we address some of the structural problems in the economy that have prevented more Googles from being created"

Barack Obama, President

Barack Obama

"We did it, Disneyland, in the knowledge that most of the people I talked to thought it would be a financial disaster - closed and forgotten within the first year"

Walt Disney, Cartoonist

Walt Disney

"It's no secret that we were sticking just about every nickel we had on the chance that people would really be interested in something totally new and unique in the field of entertainment"

Walt Disney, Cartoonist

Walt Disney

"When Yahoo! offered to buy Facebook for $1 billion in July 2006, I thought we should at least consider it. But Mark Zuckerberg walked into the board meeting and announced: "Okay, guys, this is just a formality, it shouldn't take more than 10 minutes. We're obviously not going to sell here". Mark saw where he could take the company, and Yahoo! didn't"

Mark Zuckerberg, Businessman

Mark Zuckerberg

"Working with a lot of people at the same time is a task. I really like making stuff and getting stuff done. One of the things I really liked about Facebook was that I could always move so quickly. I wrote the original application in, like, nine days at the end of January"

Mark Zuckerberg, Businessman

Mark Zuckerberg

"When I started Facebook from my dorm room in 2004, the idea that my roommates and I talked about all the time was a world that was more open"

Mark Zuckerberg, Businessman

Mark Zuckerberg

"My goal was never to make Facebook cool. I am not a cool person"

Mark Zuckerberg, Businessman

Mark Zuckerberg

"People don't care about what someone says about you in a movie - or even what you say, right? They care about what you build. And if you can make something that makes people's life better, then that's something that's really good"

Mark Zuckerberg, Businessman

Mark Zuckerberg

"My friends are people who like building cool stuff. We always have this joke about people who want to just start companies without making something valuable. There's a lot of that in Silicon Valley"

Mark Zuckerberg, Businessman

Mark Zuckerberg

"Once you have a product that you are happy with, you - the need to centralize things to continue growth"

Mark Zuckerberg, Businessman

Mark Zuckerberg

"A lot of people are focused on taking over the world or doing the biggest thing and getting the most users. I think part of making a difference and doing something cool is focusing intensely"

Mark Zuckerberg, Businessman

Mark Zuckerberg

"I started the site when I was 19. I didn't know much about business back then"

Mark Zuckerberg, Businessman

Mark Zuckerberg

"I just think people have a lot of fiction. But, you know, I mean, the real story of Facebook is just that we've worked so hard for all this time. I mean, the real story is actually probably pretty boring, right? I mean, we just sat at our computers for six years and coded"

Mark Zuckerberg, Businessman

Mark Zuckerberg

"And, we have no such thing as a budget anymore. Our manager freaks when we show him the bill. We're lavish to the bone, but all our money goes back into the product"

Freddie Mercury, Musician

Freddie Mercury

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