Quotes about Entrepreneurship

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.

What is the most powerful force in the world? And I think you would agree that is a big idea if it is in the hands of an entrepreneur who is actually going to make the idea not only happen, but spread all across society. And we understand that in business but we have need for entrepreneurship just as much in education, human rights, health, and the environment as we do in hotels and steel.

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.

What is Social Entrepreneurship?
Whenever society is stuck or has an opportunity to seize a new opportunity, it needs an entrepreneur to see the opportunity and then to turn that vision into a realistic idea and then a reality and then, indeed, the new pattern all across society. We need such entrepreneurial leadership at least as much in education and human rights as we do in communications and hotels. This is the work of social entrepreneurs.

I find it interesting that in America, even though most people are more optimistic and most people around the world do view America as the city on the hill and more entrepreneurial and more risk taking and less traditional, still in America most people don't take risks, and most people are pretty traditional. It's actually a relatively small number of people that really are those risk takers, and a relatively small number of people that end up really having an impact on the world, and it doesn't take a lot of people. It just takes a few people who really care and stick with it, and that I think is what America is about.

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.

I'm a maniacal perfectionist. And if I weren't, I wouldn't have this company.... I have proven that being a perfectionist can be profitable and admirable when creating content across the board: in television, books, newspapers, radio, videos.

Too often, we try to fit in with the crowd. We play it safe. But innovation is about taking risks while being true to you. This takes confidence. And it takes the belief that your “style” is what the world needs and wants. Yes, taking this risk may help you stand out. More importantly, it may be the ticket to your success.

Ideally, since 80 percent of your life is spent working, you should start your business around something that is a passion of yours. If you're into kite-surfing and you want to become an entrepreneur, do it with kite-surfing.

Look, if you can indulge in your passion, life will be far more interesting than if you're just working. You'll work harder at it, and you'll know more about it. But first you must go out and educate yourself on whatever it is that you've decided to do - know more about kite-surfing than anyone else. That's where the work comes in. But if you're doing things you're passionate about, that will come naturally.

What was the first business idea you came up with?

I set up this magazine called Student when I was 16, and I didn't do it to make money - I did it because I wanted to edit a magazine. There wasn't a national magazine run by students, for students. I didn't like the way I was being taught at school. I didn't like what was going on in the world, and I wanted to put it right.

Of course, a lot of businesses want to reach students, so I funded the magazine by selling advertising. I sold something like $8,000 worth of advertising for the first edition, and that was in 1966. I printed up 50,000 copies, and I didn't even have to charge for them on the newsstand because my costs were already covered.

So I became a publisher by mistake - well, not quite by mistake, because I wanted to be an editor but I had to make sure the magazine would survive. The point is this: Most businesses fail, so if you're going to succeed, it has to be about more than making money.

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.

If you were charged with fixing the U.S. auto industry, how would you do it?

The guys who run the auto companies are out of touch with their customers and their employees. They ride to work in their limousines. They go up in their elevators and lock themselves in their offices. They don't walk out into the plants. They wouldn't even drive in the neighborhoods where their employees live. They give themselves big bonuses when the company isn't making any money. I'd make them get involved with the people who are building the cars. They've got to become real people.

What has been the most rewarding moment in your decades of entrepreneurship?

Our last annual managers meeting. I gave my motivational talk and then I asked, How many people here started as a forklift operator, a warehouse person, a roof loader, or a truck driver? We had 600 people and almost half of them stood up.

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.

I would have come here from any country. The U.S. is where great things are possible.

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.

My half-baked reading of history is that we continue to go through these waves of entrepreneurial explosion followed by merger mania and consolidation. Out of that come big sluggish companies that eventually collapse under the weight of what they've created, and are killed off by the next wave of entrepreneurs.

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.

First figure out your partners, then figure out what ideas to pursue. The most important thing isn't the market you target, the product you develop or the financing, but the founding team.

"Whoever has not two-thirds of his time to himself, is a slave."

The company was actually founded on creating earnings opportunities for women, even before it went into skincare, lipstick, and fragrance. The founding Avon principle, before women could vote and when basically only men were working, was to allow women to get out of their homes and to create an entrepreneurship opportunity for them.

That was very much ahead of its time back in the 1880s and, not surprisingly, it was met with some resistance. [I]f you fast forward to today and the fact that we're the single largest source of employment for women (broadly speaking, as the reps are independent contractors), we've been an important creator of entrepreneurship for women.

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.