Quotes about Entrepreneurs

Those entrepreneurs who are successful and manage to build a business and a nest egg often manage to heap on even more risk when they decide how they're going to invest that nest egg. While building a successful business and managing your investment portfolio both require handling risk intelligently, they are very different activities. Entrepreneurs often fare worse than the average investor when it comes to making investments because many of the traits that make one a successful entrepreneur are precisely the traits that make one a disaster as an investor -- starting with an eagerness to put it all on the line.

How could any entrepreneur, confronted by such amazing opportunities to help transform the world and to do so with such extraordinary colleagues, be tempted to lose focus? Especially since the work involves such breadth that the boredom of routine or specialization does not exist.

The worst mistake I have made was to compromise on these core principles. For example, toward the end of our first period of very rapid growth (45 percent a year for five years), we hired several wonderful, spirited managers. However, they were not entrepreneurs; and they never could, partly in consequence, intuitively "get" our vision, our core stakeholders, or our culture. They set to work managing, which ended in failure, uncomprehending frustration, and culture division. Good entrepreneurs can manage, but no one but an entrepreneur can entrepreneur, let alone help build and lead the world's community of leading social entrepreneurs and their top business entrepreneur allies.

Entrepreneurs cannot be happy people until they have seen their visions become the new reality across all of society. They learn how to master whatever skills are necessary. I am, for example, modestly an introvert. However, I spent most of my days dealing with people. It helps hugely that my daily interactions are with wonderful, caring, creative entrepreneurs from whom I learn and with whom I connect. My decision to commit to the Ashoka vision turned in part on recognizing how important this balance would be. My escape for long backpack trips in the wilderness also helps. And so, of course, does finding colleagues who are complements–and with whom I and our values-based entrepreneurial community share so much that the fit works.

I do think that people have an obligation to give back but that doesn't necessarily mean that you give back just the traditional way. Maybe there's new ways to give back and make a contribution. I'm looking forward to some mix of philanthropy -- maybe through a somewhat different prism -- as well as helping entrepreneurs build some significant new businesses.

You can be entrepreneurial even if you don't want to be in business. You can be a social entrepreneur focused on the not-for-profit sector. You can be an agriculture entrepreneur if you want to change how people think about farming. You can be a policy entrepreneur if you want to go into government. The idea of an entrepreneur is really thinking out of the box and taking risks and stepping up to major challenges. Trying to instill that sense of entrepreneurship in areas other than business is one of the areas I want to focus on in the years ahead.

The spirit of entrepreneurship includes imagination, inventiveness and openness to the new. This spirit of creative response aligns with the capacity to exercise moral imagination and to see ethical problems in a new light. To be sure, our most fundamental ethical values -- values such as honesty, avoiding doing harm, keeping commitments -- are grounded in timeless traditions and are not likely to be soon abandoned. But it is in the application of these ethical values to emerging, unique situations, where moral imagination and the entrepreneurial spirit can make a decisive difference.

What is the most overrated skill for an entrepreneur?

The most overrated skill is skill. Luck is more important. The entrepreneur gets credit for being this genius, when really he was just at the right place at the right time.

If you are at all successful in your business, be prepared to never have another good day or bad day at work. There will be so many things -- good and bad -- happening on any given day that you will be on a roller coaster of highs and lows. If that excites you, then go for it.

Entrepreneurs don't really make mistakes, though. We just make decisions that seem right at the time, but which sometimes turn out to have been the wrong path to take. For example, we allowed a buyer to place a huge opening order and later had to take some product back. We didn't have our sell-through programs in place, so in hindsight, it would have been wiser to sell in less product at the outset. The scary thing is you are always making decisions without knowing the future. Should we invest in more machinery, or stay with more labor? Should we build a large inventory, or try to fill re-orders as they come in? In making these decisions, you're really betting on one outcome or another, as opposed to making mistaken decisions.

I've always learned on-the-job, in real time. A problem comes up; I research it, and try to solve it. You can't study to be an entrepreneur; you have to develop those skills day in day out.

All entrepreneurial experiences are related, whether you're selling worm poop to Wal-Mart or a grade tracking application to the public elementary school system. In the end, it's all very similar.

As the year draws to an end, I face a question that annually lurks in the back of my mind, (and I suspect in the minds of most entrepreneurs), "Do I have the energy and passion for another year?" Though someone from the outside might assume the answer is always, "Yes," people on the outside tend to glamorize the real work of leading a mission-driven company. I encounter so many job applicants drawn to Honest Tea because they want to change the way business is done -- organics, Fair Trade, healthier products, bikes for employees -- but then when they find out the way to make that all real is by walking in the rain lugging 50 pounds of heavy bottles or standing in the hot sun giving out samples, they find out they aren't quite as entrepreneurial as they thought they were. (Internally we say their "Kumbaya factor" isn't as big as their "Get it Done" factor.)

It's OK to have your eggs in one basket as long as you control what happens to that basket. The problem with the Silicon Valley financing model is that you lose control after the first investment round.

An entrepreneur plows the field and it weakens the idea that change isn't possible. He seeds with some very user-friendly idea. The next entrepreneur comes, and there's more plowing, more seeding. Then hundreds. As we wire the world together, ideas flow from Bangladesh to the United States and Brazil, and back. This becomes multiplicative. The network becomes a distribution channel.

One thing about entrepreneurs is that when they see something – an opportunity or a problem – they act on it quickly.

Anybody who is an entrepreneur is a person who essentially has impaired judgment. The odds of success are zilch. This valley is loaded to the gills with a whole lot of totally insane people who honest to God believe that they can be the next Bill Gates or the next [Sun Microsystems CEO] Scott McNealy. And that is genuinely stupid. In the great city of San Francisco, where I used to live, at 2 in the morning every other Victorian [house] has somebody who is writing the great American novel. And the city is not loaded with James Joyces or Virginia Woolfs. But entrepreneurship is about distorted views of reality.

I wanted to be an editor or a journalist, I wasn't really interested in being an entrepreneur, but I soon found I had to become an entrepreneur in order to keep my magazine going.

“(Big name research firm) says our market will be $50 billion in 2010.” Every entrepreneur has a few slides about how the market potential for his segment is tens of billions. It doesn't matter if the product is bar mitzah planning software or 802.11 chip sets. Venture capitalists don't believe this type of forecast because it's the fifth one of this magnitude that they've heard that day. Entrepreneurs would do themselves a favor by simply removing any reference to market size estimates from consulting firms.

Passion. The life of an entrepreneur is occasionally exhilirating, and almost always exhausting. Only unbridled passion for the concept is likely to see you through the 17-hour days (month after month) and the painful mistakes that are part and parcel of the start-up process.

It's the combination: big idea with a good entrepreneur: there's nothing more powerful. That's just as true [for] education and human rights as it is for hotel or steels.

What does an entrepreneur do? The first thing is they've given themselves permission to see a problem. Most people don't want to see problems ... Once you see a problem and you keep looking at it you'll find an answer.

I'm encouraging young people to become social business entrepreneurs and contribute to the world, rather than just making money. Making money is no fun. Contributing to and changing the world is a lot more fun.

Can Anyone Be an Entrepreneur?

Rich dad wanted his son and me to understand that anyone could be an entrepreneur. Being an entrepreneur was not that special. He did not want the idea of being an entrepreneur to go to our heads. He did not want us looking down on anyone or thinking we were better than other people if we became successful entrepreneurs.

To this he said, "Anyone can be an entrepreneur. Your neighborhood babysitter is an entrepreneur. So was Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company. Anyone with a little initiative can be an entrepreneur. So don't think entrepreneurs are special or better than other people. Your job is to decide which entrepreneur you most want to be like-the babysitter or Henry Ford? They both provide a valuable product or service. Both are important to their customers. Yet they operate in very different spectrums, different bandwidths of entrepreneurship. It's like the difference between sandlot football, high school football, college football, and professional football."

With that example, I understood the point rich dad was making. When I was in college in New York, playing college football, our team had the opportunity to practice with a few players from a professional football team, the New York Jets. It was a very humbling experience. It was soon obvious to all of us on the college football team that while we played the same game as the pro players, we were playing it at a completely different level of play.

As a linebacker, my first rude awakening was trying to tackle a New York Jets running back coming through the line. I doubt if he even knew I hit him. He ran right over me. It felt like I was trying to tackle a charging rhino. I did not hurt him but he definitely hurt me. That running back and I were about the same size. But after trying to tackle him, I realized the difference was not physical. It was spiritual. He had the heart, the desire, and gift of natural talent to be a great player.

The lesson I learned that day is that we both played the same game, but we were not playing at the same level of play. The same is true in the business world and the game of entrepreneurship. We can all be entrepreneurs. Being an entrepreneur is not that big a deal. A better question to be asked in designing a business is, "At what level of play do you want to play the game?"

Today, older and wiser, I do not have illusions that I would ever be as great an entrepreneur as Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Steven Jobs, or Walt Disney. Yet I can still learn from them and use them as mentors and role models. And that is rich dad's entrepreneurial lesson #1: "A successful business is created before there is a business."

The most important job of an entrepreneur is to design the business before there is a business.

Even though I took a pounding, rich dad was happy that I was learning to be a creative entrepreneur, rather than a competitive one. He said, "Some entrepreneurs win by creating. Other entrepreneurs win by copying and competing." He also said, "The riskiest of all types of entrepreneur is the creative entrepreneur, also known as an innovator."

"Why is the creative entrepreneur the riskiest type to be?" I asked. "Because being creative means you are often a pioneer. It is easy to copy a successful and proven product. It is also less risky. If you learn to innovate, create, or invent your way to success, you are an entrepreneur creating new value rather than an entrepreneur who wins by copying."

Rich dad went on to explain that the world was filled with different types of entrepreneurs. There are entrepreneurs who are big and small, rich and poor, honest and crooked, for-profit and not-for-profit, saint and sinner, small town and international, and successes and failures. He said, "The word entrepreneur is a big word and it means different things to different people."

After one of my demoralizing business failures, I went to rich dad and asked, "So what did I do wrong? I thought I designed it well." "Obviously you didn't," rich dad said with a smirk.

"How many times do I have to do this? I'm the biggest failure I know." Rich dad said, "Losers quit when they fail. Winners fail until they succeed." Shuffling the papers at his desk for a moment, he then looked up at me and said, "The world is filled with want-to-be entrepreneurs. They sit behind desks, have important sounding titles like vice-president, branch manager, or supervisor, and some even take home a decent paycheck. These want-to-be entrepreneurs dream of someday starting their own business empire and maybe someday some of them will. Yet I believe most will never make the leap. Most will have some excuse, some rationalization, such as, 'When the kids are grown.' Or, 'I'll go back to school first.' Or, 'When I have enough money saved.'"

"But they never jump from the plane," I said, finishing his thoughts. Rich dad nodded.

The most important job of the entrepreneur begins before there is a business or employees. The job of an entrepreneur is to design a business that can grow, employ many people, add value to its customers, be a responsible corporate citizen, bring prosperity to all those that work on the business, be charitable, and eventually no longer need the entrepreneur. Before there is a business, a successful entrepreneur is designing this type of business in his or her mind's eye. According my rich dad, this is the job of a true entrepreneur.

The core psychology of a social entrepreneur is someone who cannot come to rest, in a very deep sense, until he or she has changed the pattern in an area of social concern all across society. Social entrepreneurs are married to a vision of, for example, a better way of helping young people grow up or of delivering global healthcare. They simply will not stop because they cannot be happy until their vision becomes the new pattern. They will persist for decades. And they are as realistic as they are visionary. As a result, they are very good listeners. They have to hear if something isn’t working; and, whenever they do, they just keep changing the idea and/or the environment until their idea works. They are intensely concerned with the how-to’s: How do I get from here to there? How do I solve this problem? How do these pieces fit together?

Good entrepreneurs can manage, but no one but an entrepreneur can entrepreneur, let alone help build and lead the world's community of leading social entrepreneurs and their top business entrepreneur allies.

What does an entrepreneur do? The first thing is they've given themselves permission to see a problem. Most people don't want to see problems ... Once you see a problem and you keep looking at it you'll find an answer.