ENTREPRENEURSHIP

I built thinkorswim because I was angry. The tools that professional options traders had were not available to retail investors. That was wrong. So I fixed it.

I started a YouTube channel in college about credit cards. I made more from that channel than I would have made from any internship.

Every time I see a new regulation, I think to myself: there goes another business opportunity.

I got fired from Facebook after two weeks for telling them their user metrics were misleading. They went on to become one of the most valuable companies in the world. I went on to bet on Bitcoin.

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

I could either watch it happen or be part of it.

The first step is to establish that something is possible. Then probability will occur.

When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.

I knew that if I failed I wouldn't regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not trying.

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

I started the site when I was 19. I did not know what I was doing. Most great things are started by people who do not know what they are doing.

The biggest risk is not taking any risk. In a world that is changing quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.

Speed is incredibly important. Whatever you want to do, you have to do it now. Not tomorrow. Now.

Massive action is the cure to all problems.

The difference between a good entrepreneur and a great one is that great ones know their next five moves.

The secret to AppSumo's success is not genius. It is that we kept showing up and kept shipping.

The best time to start a business was yesterday. The second best time is today. Stop planning. Start doing.

If you don't believe in what you're selling, nobody else will either.

I bet on the jockey, not the horse. I can always fix the business. I cannot fix the person.

Know what you're good at and stop doing everything else.

I don't care about your feelings. I care about your numbers.

Sweat equity is the most valuable equity there is.

It doesn't matter how many times you fail. You only have to be right once.

What I've learned is that if you really want to be successful at something, you'll find that you put the time in. You won't just ask somebody if it's a good idea — you'll go figure it out.

The easiest way to make money is to create something of such value that everybody wants it and go out and give it to them.

You don't need permission to start a business. You need a plan, a customer, and the guts to begin.

The best founders are the ones who see the world differently and refuse to accept no for an answer.

Hustle isn't a dirty word. Outworking the competition is a legitimate edge.

Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten.

I failed at my first business at 16 and lost $5,000. Best money I ever spent.

Don't optimize for money. Optimize for learning. The money follows.

The fastest way to become wealthy is to build a business. The best way to stay wealthy is to invest.

If we tried to think of a good idea, we wouldn't have been able to think of a good idea. You just have to find the solution for a problem in your own life.

I'm a developer who accidentally became a CEO. Snowboards were the gateway drug.

Arm the rebels. That's what Shopify does. We give superpowers to the little guys.

Life is too short to work at a company that makes something nobody cares about.

I dropped out of college because I couldn't sit still long enough to finish a degree. Turns out that energy is pretty useful for building a startup.

I dropped out of college at 20 with a Thiel Fellowship and no idea what to build. It took pivoting from drones to flight search to design tools before we found it.

I was rejected by over 100 investors. One literally fell asleep during my pitch. You just keep going. The hundred-and-first meeting is the one that changes everything.

There are 150 million people who wake up every morning and don't want to go to the office. We are going to save those people.

Traffic is driving me nuts. Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging.

I got kicked out of Facebook and decided to build autonomous weapons for the Pentagon. I'm not sure which job my parents were more confused about.

Our first delivery was pad thai. I drove it myself. The customer tipped $5 and I thought we were rich.

I failed at 20 startups before Instacart. The secret is that each failure taught me what not to build. Instacart was the first thing I actually needed myself.

We didn't win our Harvard business plan competition. The judges said the idea wouldn't work. We built it anyway and Uber surrendered the entire region.

My first app was a total failure. Nobody downloaded it. But I noticed users were saving products obsessively. The collecting behavior was the product.

I retired at 23 and was miserable. Turns out, having nothing to do is the worst thing that can happen to someone who loves building things.

We started because buying Funko Pops on eBay was boring and full of fakes. Live selling fixes both problems — you see the item, you see the seller, and the energy is addictive.

Our professor gave us a B on the business plan for Cloudflare. Most expensive B in Harvard Business School history.

I bootstrapped UiPath from a Bucharest apartment for ten years. Then in three years we went from unknown to a $35 billion company. Patience has a way of compounding.

We sold our last company to Microsoft for $320 million. This time we said let's aim higher. Thirty-two billion higher, as it turned out.

I spent six months taking screenshots to prove our security controls worked. Then I spent another six months doing it again the next year. There had to be a better way.

I got fired from my own company. Most people would have given up. I started a better company six months later. Failure is information, not identity.

I built Expedia to make travel prices transparent. Then Zillow for home prices. Glassdoor does the same for salaries. My whole career is ruining information asymmetry.

I was a CPA sitting in a cubicle thinking, this can't be it. I quit to teach yoga, started designing shorts in my apartment, and ten years later SoftBank valued the company at $4 billion. Life is weird.

At 19, I was the youngest Indian to receive the Thiel Fellowship. Peter Thiel paid me $100,000 to drop out of college. Best education I never got.

Every moment in business happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page won't make a search engine.

An entrepreneur is someone who will jump off a cliff and assemble a plane on the way down.

All humans are entrepreneurs not because they should start companies but because the will to create is encoded in human DNA.

If you have a dream, you have to try it. You will regret it for the rest of your life if you don't.

The best founders I've backed all have one thing in common: they're more obsessed with the problem than they are with being right.

The struggle is not failure but it causes failure. Especially if you are weak. Always if you are weak.

The best thing you can do for an entrepreneur is tell them the truth.

San Francisco decided it didn't want to be the center of innovation anymore. Miami said yes.

If you're building something genuinely new, most people are going to tell you it's a bad idea. That's how you know you're onto something.

The best founders I've seen are obsessed with a specific problem, not with being a founder. If you're excited about startups in the abstract, that's a yellow flag.

If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late.

If you want to change how the government works, you have to build the software it runs on. Complaining doesn't scale.

The founders who build things that matter are the ones willing to work in unsexy, difficult, slow-moving domains for a decade.

Patience is the most underrated attribute of a successful entrepreneur.

Skills are cheap. Passion is priceless.

Failure is not the opposite of success; it's a part of success.

If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late.

SecondMarket taught me that liquidity is the product. In crypto, we're doing the same thing — making an illiquid asset class liquid for the world.

I started this company because I wanted to democratize healthcare. Not just access — understanding.

My dad and I built this at a kitchen table. He's a financial advisor. I was in college. We just thought — why is this so hard for normal people?

We built Adyen because payments were broken. Every country had different systems, different rules, different failures. We said: one platform, everywhere.

I sold my first company at 24. I could have coasted. But I kept seeing teams duct-taping spreadsheets together and thinking — this is insane.

We spent two years building before we launched anything. Most people thought we were crazy. Turns out the product needed that time.

I got rejected from Harvard ten times. I got rejected from KFC — they hired 23 people and I was the only one rejected. Rejection is just part of the story.

Today is hard, tomorrow will be worse, but the day after tomorrow will be sunshine. Most people die tomorrow evening.

I built an internal task tracker at Facebook that people loved. Then I thought — why does only Facebook get to have this?

I left Facebook because I realized the biggest impact I could have wasn't building a social network. It was helping teams actually get work done.

We had the product. We had the demand. We just didn't have a business model that worked. That's a different kind of failure — the most frustrating kind.

I was the youngest person on the SAP executive board. I walked away from a clear path to CEO. People thought I was insane. Maybe they were right.

I built BetterHelp because someone I knew needed a therapist and couldn't find one. Not because of money — because of availability. There just weren't enough therapists.

We launched at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2010 with $400,000 and a product that managed money for free. People thought we were either lying or about to go broke.

We went to Y Combinator with a VR idea. Two weeks in, we killed it and pivoted to corporate cards. YC said: you're insane. Then they backed us.

We dropped out of Stanford after one semester. Our professor said we were making a mistake. Our bank account disagreed.

Two Brazilian immigrants, 22 years old, telling American banks we're going to take their corporate card business. Nobody took us seriously. That was our advantage.

Pedro and I started our first company in Brazil at 14. We were too young to sign the incorporation papers. Our parents had to do it.

I spent 20 years at BTG Pactual. I knew exactly how banks worked, how they priced, and where they overcharged. That knowledge became C6's blueprint.

My first company was the Million Dollar Homepage. I sold pixels on a webpage for a dollar each. It worked. Calm is slightly more sophisticated.

We're a British guy who sold pixels and a British guy who made video games, running America's biggest mental health app. Nobody saw that coming, least of all us.

I don't come from chip design. I come from building companies. The chip designers told me a wafer-scale chip was impossible. I asked why. Nobody had a good answer.

We built LaMDA at Google. Google was terrified of it. We weren't terrified — we were excited. That's the difference between a big company and a startup.

I co-wrote the Transformer paper at Google. Then Google wouldn't let me ship anything with it. So I left and built Character.ai. Sometimes bureaucracy is the best co-founder recruiter.

I'm Canadian. Nick is Canadian. We built Cohere in Toronto. Everyone assumed we'd move to San Francisco. We didn't. Toronto has the talent. The Valley has the hype. We chose talent.

I dropped out of Harvard Business School to start a company in South Korea. My professors thought I was throwing away my career. I was just picking a different one.

I sold FreeCharge to Axis Bank for $60 million. I could have retired. But I had a thesis about trust and high-net-worth users that I needed to test. CRED is that test.

I'm Spanish. I moved to Brazil because I saw the biggest gap between what banks charge and what lending should cost. That gap is a $500 billion opportunity.

I moved from Italy to New York with five co-founders and no revenue. Five Italians sharing a two-bedroom apartment, building a mattress company. Our families thought we'd lost our minds.

I was a carpenter. I made furniture and couldn't find anywhere to sell it online. eBay was for used junk. Amazon was for mass-produced stuff. So I built Etsy.

I dropped out of high school to start a business. Then I went bankrupt at 21. Then I built a $31 billion company. The dropout part is not the lesson. The bankruptcy part is.

I owned GSI Commerce. Sold it to eBay for $2.4 billion. Kept Fanatics because I thought it could be bigger. eBay got $2.4 billion. I got $31 billion. Best negotiation of my life.

I worked at PayPal and realized they had zero interest in Africa. 1.4 billion people and nobody was building for them. So I went home and built it myself.

We became a $3 billion company from Lagos. Not San Francisco. Not London. Lagos. That matters for every African founder who thinks they need to leave to build something big.

Daishin and I failed at our previous startup — a food delivery app. We were two years too early. With GOAT, the timing was perfect. Sometimes the only difference between failure and a unicorn is timing.

All four of us came from Flipkart. We saw what happened when you made e-commerce simple for India. We thought: what if we did the same thing for investing?

I co-founded DeepMind. We sold it to Google for $500 million. Then I watched Google bureaucracy slowly suffocate everything we built. Inflection was my escape.

I spent 10 years trying to get this company funded. Ten years. VCs said card issuing was boring. Then Square Cash Card launched on our platform and suddenly everyone wanted in.

I started this in 1999. During the dot-com crash. In Argentina. During an economic collapse. Everyone said the timing was terrible. I say: if you can survive that, you can survive anything.

I wrote my Stanford MBA thesis on building an eBay for Latin America. My professor gave me a B. The market gave me $80 billion. I'll take the B.

I'm a four-time founder. The first three didn't work. Mercury is the one that did. Four tries. That's what entrepreneurship actually looks like — nobody talks about the first three.

We were at Wix together. Eran and I saw the same thing: teams were drowning in tools and none of them talked to each other. We built Monday to be the one tool that replaces ten.

I bought the company back out of bankruptcy for almost nothing. The brand still had love. People missed MoviePass. They just didn't miss losing $20 million a month. Neither did I.

We spent 10 years building Noom before it became an overnight success. Ten years. The app launched in 2012 and didn't go mainstream until 2019. Patience is a business strategy.

Joel and I tried to get a loan for our previous business. We had revenue, profits, and real customers. The bank said no. That rejection created a $2.8 billion company. Thanks, Barclays.

We filed for an IPO. A fintech company from India, founded in 1998, going public after 25 years. Not every startup story is a two-year blitz. Some take a quarter century.

William and I started by building a budgeting app. It was bad. But the bank connection layer we built for it was really good. So we killed the app and sold the plumbing. Best pivot decision we ever made.

I'm an engineer from India who somehow built the most social fashion marketplace in America. I don't know anything about fashion. I know a lot about building communities. That turned out to be the skill that mattered.

Steve and I ran a previous startup together. The hardest part wasn't the product — it was dealing with our bank. Opening an account took weeks. Getting a card took longer. We thought: we'll build the bank we wish we had.

Shashank and I were at IIT Roorkee together. Two engineering students who knew nothing about finance. We built a payments company because integrating payments into our college project was so painful that we thought — someone should fix this.

I'm from Chile. I came to NYU for an MFA in art. Not computer science — art. Runway started as my thesis project. A Chilean art student built one of the most important AI companies in the world. I love that story.

I dropped out of MIT at 19 to start Scale AI. My parents are both physicists. They understood probability well enough to know this was a bad bet. But they let me do it.

I wrote a book called Banking On It. The publisher wanted a subtitle. I suggested: "How I disrupted an industry." They said that sounded arrogant. I said: I'm a woman in her fifties who built a bank from scratch. If that's not disruption, what is?

I co-founded Groupon. Built it to a $30 billion IPO. It was the fastest-growing company in history at the time. Tempus is harder. But it matters more. Coupons versus cancer. Easy choice.

We built the entire infrastructure from scratch — the photography, the pricing algorithms, the warehouses. Nobody else wanted to do the hard, unglamorous work.

I have been working on distributed systems my entire career. AI just happens to be the most important distributed systems problem of this generation.

The best hosts on Turo earn more from sharing their cars than they pay in car payments. We turned car ownership from a cost center into a revenue stream.

We started at Y Combinator as two guys who did not know anything about payments. We just knew that every business in Southeast Asia was struggling to get paid online.

We have never raised a single rupee of external funding. Zero. Every broker in India was chasing VC money and we just built a profitable business from day one.

I started Zirtual because I needed a virtual assistant and every service I tried was terrible. Bad communication, missed deadlines, zero accountability. So I built my own.

I walked into rooms where I was the only Black person and the assumption was always that I was there to park someone's car. Then I bought the building. That changes assumptions quickly.

I started with $10,000 and built affordable housing that nobody else wanted to build. Now I build neighborhoods. The principle is the same — find what other people will not do and do it better.

Wealth comes from equity, not income. A paycheck makes you a living. Ownership makes you wealthy. That is why I built Keller Williams as a profit-sharing company — so agents could be owners, not employees.

I left BiggerPockets — the most popular real estate podcast in the world — to go all in on my own fund. People thought I was crazy. But I did not build a media platform to stay behind a microphone forever.

I am a Nigerian immigrant who built a $3 billion company in Atlanta, Georgia. Not San Francisco. Not New York. Atlanta. You do not need to be in Silicon Valley to build something great. You just need to solve a real problem.

We met at a Startup Weekend in Columbia, Missouri. Three guys who could not afford to move to Silicon Valley built one of the most valuable SaaS companies in the world. Location does not matter. The product matters.

We pivoted from user testing to video messaging. The pivot felt terrifying at the time. It turned out to be a $975 million decision.

Today is hard, tomorrow will be worse, but the day after tomorrow will be sunshine. Most people die tomorrow evening.

When you are small, you have to be very focused and rely on your brain, not your strength. The small guys can beat the big guys if they are smarter and faster.

I started Xiaomi at 41 because I realized I had one more big fight left in me. If not now, when? If not this, what? Age is an excuse, not a reason.

I left Samsung because I realized I would spend 30 years building someone else's dream. I wanted to spend 30 years building my own — even if it failed.

The chaebol system taught me what I didn't want to be. Korea doesn't need more inherited empires. It needs more people who build from nothing.

I sued my own government for five years to get a telecom license. Everyone said I was crazy. But I knew the law was on my side, and the law eventually prevailed. That's the power of democracy — even an imperfect one.

Africa doesn't need charity. It needs connectivity, capital, and competent entrepreneurs. Give a village internet access and watch what happens — you don't need to tell them what to do with it.

I answer questions from young entrepreneurs on Facebook because someone answered mine when I was young. The cycle of mentorship is the most important investment any successful person can make.

I flew to Tokyo after the Mt. Gox hack and saw the mess firsthand. That's when I decided — someone needs to build an exchange that actually works. That someone might as well be me.

Zuckerberg taught us that ideas are worthless without execution. We've applied that lesson to everything since — including building Gemini from scratch while everyone said crypto was a scam.

I got laid off from Siemens, taught myself Solidity in a few months, and built the most-used decentralized exchange in the world. My career counselor did not predict this path.

I read a Vitalik blog post about automated market makers and thought "I could build that." Six months of coding later, here we are. Sometimes the best businesses start with a blog post and naive optimism.

Our first app hit #1 in the App Store. Our second company powers trillions in blockchain transactions. Joe and I have a pattern: build things people didn't know they needed.

We pivoted Circle three times before USDC. Consumer payments, crypto exchange, tokenization — none of them stuck. USDC stuck because it solves a real problem: moving dollars at internet speed. Pivoting is not failure — it's search.

I've started three companies. The first made Flash Player. The second made video streaming. The third makes digital dollars. Each one was about moving something analog to the internet. Money was just the last thing to go.

I give $5,000 to 1,000 entrepreneurs every year with no strings attached. Some will fail. But the ones who succeed will create jobs, pay taxes, and transform their communities. That's the highest-return investment I know.

Every young African I fund is a potential employer, not an employee. We are not creating workers — we are creating owners. That distinction changes everything.

The private sector must lead Africa's development. Governments can create conditions, but only entrepreneurs create jobs. Only businesses create wealth. That is not an opinion — it is history.

I got ripped off on foreign exchange fees during a holiday trip and thought — this is insane, why is this still happening in 2015? So I built a company to fix it. The best businesses come from personal frustration.

The biggest risk is not taking any risk. In a world that's changing quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.

I was coding at 8, running a web business at 14, and had 25 employees in high school. My parents had no idea what I was doing. Neither did I, honestly. I just knew I wanted to build things.

I created 42 because the education system produces employees, not entrepreneurs. No teachers, no tuition, no diploma — just problems to solve and people to solve them with. If you can survive 42, you can survive anything.

You don't need permission to change things. You just need to build something better and cheaper. The incumbents will fight you. The customers will thank you. Guess which one matters more.

We started Infosys with $250 between seven of us. Today it's worth $80 billion. The lesson is simple: you don't need money to start. You need an idea, a team, and the willingness to work harder than anyone else for a very long time.

Wealth is built through ownership, not employment. Your boss will never pay you what you're worth — because if they did, they wouldn't make money. Own something. Even if it's small. Even if it's boring. Especially if it's boring.

I treat business ideas like a sports fan treats draft picks. Obsessive analysis, bold predictions, zero filter. Some picks are busts. But when you hit, you hit big.

I left a tenured professor position at Cornell to build Avalanche. In academia, that's the equivalent of setting your career on fire. But some things need to be built, not just published.

I started Redwood in my garage in Nevada. People ask why the Tesla CTO was working in a garage. Because that's where you start when you're solving a problem nobody else is working on yet.

The best businesses are the ones that sound boring when you explain them but print money when you run them.

Start something while you are still in school. You will never have less to lose than right now.

We nearly went bankrupt three times before going public. Solar hardware is not for the faint of heart — or the faint of balance sheet.

When we started in 2009, people thought we were crazy. Now Microsoft, Stripe, and Shopify are our customers. The world caught up.

The hardest part of building a logistics company is not the software. It is the physical reality of moving things across oceans.

The direct-to-consumer revolution created a million small brands. We are the infrastructure that lets them compete with the giants.

I got fired by my own board and rehired 48 hours later. Startups are weird.

We went from zero to a $20 billion market cap by putting sensors on things that move. It sounds simple because the best ideas always do.

We sold Meraki to Cisco for a billion dollars. Then we looked at the physical world and realized it was still operating completely blind. That was the next problem.

We started ShipBob because we were packing orders in our apartment and realized every small e-commerce brand was doing the same thing. That does not scale.

I saw thousands of van drivers sitting around with empty vehicles while businesses were desperate for deliveries. The match was obvious.

We took Fortress public, sold it to SoftBank, bought the Bucks, won a championship. Not bad for a kid from Oregon State.

Fortress was the first alternative investment firm to go public. Everyone said it was a mistake. We proved them wrong, then sold to SoftBank for $3.3 billion.

I co-founded Apollo, then left to start Ares. Sometimes you have to leave something great to build something that is yours.

I co-founded Apollo at 25 years old. Nobody gave us a chance. Thirty years and $670 billion later, I think the bet worked out.

The first class was Dustin Hoffman teaching acting. When a two-time Oscar winner says yes, suddenly every other celebrity takes your call.

I invented CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA before Duolingo. I have accidentally wasted more human time than almost anyone alive. Duolingo is my redemption.

I started teaching on YouTube because I was bored and good at physics. 15 million subscribers later, I realized bored people can change the world.

I taught myself math on the internet and won a Math Olympiad silver medal. Then I moved to Silicon Valley to make sure every kid in every village could do the same.

Nobody built like you. You design yourself.

Queensbridge taught me to see opportunity where other people see risk. Every startup I invest in reminds me of hustling — same energy, different game.

Hip-hop and venture capital have the same rule: bet on yourself when nobody else will.

Retiring from tennis was terrifying. Starting Serena Ventures was exciting. The competitive energy does not go away — you just redirect it.

I would not wish starting a company on anybody. It is suffering. If I knew what I know now, I might not have done it. But then I would have missed everything.

We started NVIDIA at a Denny's. If you are going to build a trillion-dollar company, you might as well start at a place with good pancakes.

We started Sweetgreen because there was nowhere to get a quick, healthy lunch near Georgetown. That problem exists in every city in America.

We started delivering hookah and snacks from a storage unit in college. Same idea, different scale.

I left Blue Origin because I wanted to move faster. In a startup, the speed of iteration is everything.

I built my first rocket engine in my garage in Invercargill, New Zealand. Population 50,000. Nobody told me I could not do it because nobody around me knew enough about rockets to say that.

I am Australian. I came to America because this is the only country where you can build a defense manufacturing startup from scratch and get funded by the best VCs in the world.

We left NASA because we wanted to build satellites faster than government allows. In the private sector, we launch more satellites per year than NASA launches per decade.

Three air mattresses on the floor. That was the entire business plan. Every VC in Silicon Valley said no.

We sold cereal boxes to fund Airbnb. Obama O's and Cap'n McCains. We made $30,000. If you are not willing to look stupid, you are not willing to succeed.

We grew up in a village in Ireland with 100 people. There was no "tech ecosystem." We just had the internet and curiosity.

I built Shopify because I wanted to sell snowboards and every e-commerce platform was terrible. Solve your own problem first.

I co-founded Twitter and Square at the same time. People said you cannot run two companies. I said watch me. They were partially right.

I had $5,000 and a pair of scissors. That was my startup funding. Every VC would have laughed me out of the room.

I got fired and used my severance to start a company. Getting fired was the best thing that ever happened to me.

I have started over 400 companies. Most of them failed. But I only needed a handful of winners to become a billionaire.

Screw it, let's do it. That has been my business philosophy for 50 years and it has worked out more often than not.

I started Bolt from my parents' house in Estonia at 19. Everyone said a teenager cannot compete with Uber. 200 million users later, here we are.

I'm not a businessman. I'm a business, man.

The Power of Broke is real. When you have nothing to lose, you have everything to gain.

I didn't have money, but I had hustle. And hustle always beats money when money doesn't hustle.

I started Cruise in my apartment with the idea that any car could become autonomous. GM bought that idea for a billion dollars. What we built with it was extraordinary, even if the ending was not.

I started making games in my parents basement in Maryland. The first one was a text adventure written in BASIC.

Before Roblox I built physics simulations for education. Turns out kids would rather build their own worlds than study mine.

We started in Copenhagen because that is where we were. Nobody moves to Copenhagen to start a game engine company.

We built Unity because the tools to make games were terrible. We just wanted to make a game and ended up making the tools instead.

I moved from Argentina to San Francisco as a teenager with basically nothing. Open source gave me a career before anyone gave me a chance.

I was at Palantir and watched brilliant engineers spend months building admin panels. That is a broken system.

I spent ten years trying to build the tool I wished existed when I was a kid making websites in my bedroom.

I built Zoom because I was tired of bad video calls. Every terrible meeting I sat through at Cisco was product research.

I started Zomato because I was tired of waiting in line at the office cafeteria. The best startups come from personal frustration.

I learned more about business at Stanford in two years than in any job. But I learned more about survival running Sea Group than at Stanford.

Age is not a barrier to entrepreneurship. Experience is an advantage. I knew things at 49 that I did not know at 29.

I left banking at 49 to sell lipstick online. Everyone thought I had lost my mind. Turns out I found it.

I built Expedia, Glassdoor, and Zillow. All three were about making opaque information transparent. That is the pattern.

I ran a marathon in all 50 states before I started Compass. Building a company is harder. But only slightly.

Stanford taught me how to think. India taught me how to build. I dropped out of one to focus on the other.

We were 19 when we started Zepto. People said we were too young. Then they said 10-minute delivery was impossible. We proved both wrong.

We had 55 employees when Facebook bought us for 19 billion dollars. That is 345 million per employee. Keep your teams small.

I was a law student in Helsinki. Now I run a protocol that lends billions without a single loan officer.

Meta killed Diem. We took the technology and built something bigger. Sometimes getting fired is the best thing that can happen.

I bought my first steel mill at 26 in Indonesia. Everyone said I was too young. The mill did not care how old I was.

I dropped out of college twice. No MBA. No connections. Just a better database and the willingness to outwork everyone.

I started Oracle with two thousand dollars. It is now worth four hundred billion. Not bad for a college dropout.

I left Oracle to start Salesforce. Larry Ellison was my mentor. He thought I was crazy. He was right. Crazy works.

I built Getir in Istanbul in 2015. Five years before anyone heard the word quick commerce. Being first is not the same as being right.

I started as a math teacher in Kerala. Ten years later I was running the most valuable edtech company in the world.

We started Talkspace after our own couples therapy changed our marriage. The best products come from personal experience.

I started Dell with a thousand dollars in my dorm room. Forty years later it generates a hundred billion in revenue. Compound growth is real.

I dropped out of UT Austin because the business was growing too fast. The professors understood. My parents less so.

I was a cardiologist spending half my day typing notes. I thought: what if AI could just listen and write them for me?

I ran Tesla's energy storage division. Lithium-ion is great for 4 hours. The grid needs 100 hours. That gap is why Form Energy exists.

Let everyone else call your idea crazy... just keep going. Don't stop. Don't even think about stopping until you get there.

The cowards never started and the weak died along the way. That leaves us.

I had a choice: I could let what happened to me define me, or I could use it to build something better.

Building a company while pregnant showed me I could do anything. I rang the IPO bell with a baby in my belly.

Fear is the disease. Hustle is the antidote.

Don't sit around and wait for someone to give you a seat at the table. Build your own table.

When I was a boy in Bulgaria, I never imagined I would start a company that would change how millions of people interact with the financial markets.

I'm a hustler. I have to eat. I'll figure it out. I always figure it out.

I taught myself to program from a book. I built the trading systems with my own hands. In America, that's enough.

Capital isn't scarce; vision is.

Don't wait for someone to give you a seat at the table. Build your own table. Build your own restaurant.

I was making smoothie cups in my apartment. Now we're in Walmart. The journey has been wild.

Our streamers are not employees. They're entrepreneurs building their own businesses on our platform.

I look for big thinkers. I want founders who want to transform the world, not just build a company.

The world is going to change, and the people who change it are the ones who seem crazy at first.

The way to build a great fortune is to build a great enterprise. The money follows the value.

We want to increase the GDP of the internet by making it easier for anyone to start a business.

Running out of money is not the worst thing. Running out of ideas is the worst thing.

Don't worry about failure; you only have to be right once.

I spent my whole life making music. Beats was just making music louder.

We didn't start Casamigos to build a business. We started it because we wanted better tequila.

I don't endorse companies. I buy them. If I'm going to sell something, I want to own it.

SKIMS started because I couldn't find shapewear that matched my skin tone. Simple problem, billion-dollar solution.

The billion-dollar exit was an accident. We just wanted good tequila for our houses.

I started with a $500,000 loan from my uncle. Now I employ 30,000 people. That's what entrepreneurship does.

I started my companies while still playing because I knew sports careers end. Build now.

I took over a cooking oil company at 21 and turned it into an IT company. People called me mad.

I sold my first company to Apple when I was 21. The lesson: start young, think big.

I left a CEO job to make angel bets because I'd rather be in the arena than the skybox.

I started YC because I believed the startup world needed more empathy, not less.

The world's biggest problems are the world's biggest business opportunities.

I built SoFi, got pushed out, and started Figure the next year. Setbacks are just setup for the next thing.

A terrible cab ride in Bangalore inspired Ola. Bad service creates great companies.

I spent my childhood watching my mom work 18-hour days in her restaurant. DoorDash exists because of those days.

The best startups solve problems their founders have personally experienced.

Growing up in Medellin during the worst years taught me something: big problems aren't permanent if someone is stubborn enough to solve them.

Everyone told us we were crazy to start a bank in Brazil. Five banks controlled everything. But that's exactly why the opportunity existed.

In the early days, I was the delivery driver, the customer support rep, and the CEO. Sometimes all in the same hour.

I was fired from ICM. Best thing that ever happened to me. I started Endeavor the next week.

I've built three companies. Each one was worth over a billion dollars. I think I know what I'm doing.

Facebook offered us $3 billion. We were 23. Everyone said we were stupid to turn it down.

I lied on my resume to get into the William Morris mailroom. I intercepted the verification letter and forged the response. It worked.

I have 120 patents. People think patents are for scientists. They're for anyone who looks at something and thinks: I can make this better.

I started my first business at 13 selling T-shirts. I've been an entrepreneur every day since. Shopify just gave me the biggest stage.

I was in law school using Shopify to sell T-shirts. I loved the product so much I called Tobi and said I have to work here.

I sold 2,500 units in 10 minutes on my first QVC appearance. That moment changed my life forever.

I started the Foundation because I got lucky and had access. Most women entrepreneurs don't. That has to change.

I started this company from my kitchen table at 37. Everyone in fashion told me I was too old and too unknown. They were wrong.

Shopify exists to arm the rebels. Every independent merchant competing against Amazon is a rebel, and we give them the weapons.

I came to America with nothing from the Soviet Union. Every investment since has been a bet on freedom and markets.

In Russia in the 1990s, there were no rules. You either figured it out or you disappeared.

I dropped out of USC to run Box from a dorm room. My parents were not thrilled. They're fine now.

Fidelity let me manage $15 billion. I left because the best investors eventually need to run their own money.

I started SurgoCap because I wanted to invest with the same rigor but with more flexibility in what I could own.

I taught myself Solidity from online tutorials while unemployed. You don't need a CS degree to change finance.

I got laid off from Siemens. Learned to code. Built the largest decentralized exchange in the world. Unemployment was the best thing that happened to me.

My parents traded goods on the Grand Canal. I trade goods on the internet. The scale is different. The principle is the same.

I opened my first electronics stall with $1,800. My entire life savings. If it failed, I had nothing. So I made sure it didn't fail.

I built my businesses through hard work and entrepreneurship, like any other businessperson.

Angola needs private enterprise. Someone had to build the companies. I did.

I had 12 employees and $360 million in revenue. People say I'm not self-made. I say: show me another 12-person company doing $360 million.

15,000 lip kits. Sold out in under a minute. That's when I knew this wasn't a hobby.

The best startup ideas come from solving your own problem. I was too lazy to go grocery shopping. That's it.

I wanted to give athletes a platform to tell their own stories, unfiltered. That's why I started The Players' Tribune.

I dropped out of college six times. At some point, the universe was telling me something.

I couldn't get a taxi in Paris. That frustration became a $120 billion company.

We built the largest digital bank in the world from an apartment in São Paulo. Nobody gave us permission. We just did it.

IIT Delhi and IIM Ahmedabad taught me how to think. Building a company taught me everything else.

I built UTV from cable TV piracy into a company Disney wanted to buy. The journey matters more than the exit.

I built Ola because I had a terrible cab ride. The best companies come from personal frustration.

I built Takeaway.com as a student project in 2000. Online food ordering before smartphones, before Uber, before everything.

We started Morning Brew because the Wall Street Journal was too boring for our generation. Turns out millions of people agreed.

My wife Sudha lent me money to start Infosys. That was the best investment she ever made — not just financially.

India will become a great nation when the majority of its young people dream of creating jobs, not just getting them.

Every entrepreneur needs to be comfortable with a very high level of uncertainty. If you wait for certainty, you'll never start.

I want OYO to be a company where a 19-year-old from a small town can walk in and build something great.

I never thought of myself as an entrepreneur. I just wanted to teach in a way that made sense.

Failure is not the enemy. The real enemy is the fear of failure that stops you from trying again.

The best decision I made was to stay in hundreds of budget hotels before I built one. You have to live the problem.

The biggest mistake founders make is solving for the median user. The median user is already served. Solve for the extreme user.

I lost an election. Then I visited schools and saw almost no girls learning to code. The loss gave me a purpose bigger than winning.

I started with scrap. People laughed. Scrap is how you learn that everything has value if you know how to find it.

I built this from a ski shop. With ten thousand pounds. Nobody helped me. I'm not complaining — that's just the context.

The Oz trial taught me that authority is bluffing most of the time. If you call the bluff confidently enough, you walk away. It's served me well in business.

I spent seven years with no revenue and a wife who had every reason to doubt me. I kept going because I had no good reason to stop.

If you want to be rich, never give away equity. That is the one rule. Everything else is negotiable.

Uber said no. That was the best thing that ever happened to Grab. We had to build it ourselves, which meant we built it right for Southeast Asia.

I gave up law because I realized I would spend my life arguing about other people's problems. I wanted to build something that was mine.

My dad left me nothing because he wanted me to build it myself. Best investment decision he ever made, even though it wasn't for me.

The first man gets the oyster, the second man gets the shell.

If you want to succeed you should strike out on new paths, rather than travel the worn paths of accepted success.

The hardest thing is knowing when to walk away from what defines you. The second hardest thing is building something new.

I wanted wine that I'd actually enjoy drinking — not a label with my face on it. There's a big difference.

Energy drinks are where the culture goes next. Ghost is not a sponsorship — it is a real business we are building together.

The wine business taught me that patience pays. You plant, you wait, and if you did everything right, something great comes out of it.

Maison No. 9 happened because I genuinely love rosé. If it didn't taste good to me, I wouldn't have put my name on it.

I built Destiny's Child from nothing. Not from a record label's money. From belief, from discipline, and from never accepting no.

You have to know who you are before you can build anything that matters.

Taking over Steak n Shake at 31 was either the bravest or the dumbest thing I’ve ever done. The stock price says it was the former.

A car is just four wheels and two sofas. How hard can it be?

I started with $7,500 and TV knobs. Fifty years later, we make every iPhone on earth. Scale is the only strategy that matters.

A monk owning a company confuses people. But someone has to commercialize India’s ancient knowledge. Why not us?

I sold EchoSign to Adobe and thought I’d retire. Then I started answering questions on Quora and accidentally built the world’s largest SaaS community.

I didn't come into the middle of the desert to build a town. I wasn't that crazy.

European startups have a massive advantage in building HR tech. We understand labor laws and employee rights at a level that most American companies have never had to think about.

We bootstrapped Toptal because we wanted to build a real business, not a fundraising machine. Revenue solves problems that venture capital creates.

We learned everything at Banco Garantia. It was not a bank. It was a war school for capitalism.

I never wanted to just be an heiress. I wanted to build something that would outlast the thing I inherited.

I started with one restaurant. Every empire starts with one thing done well.

I did not come this far by asking permission.

I gave up a career to join something I believed in. That is the only way to build something that matters.

I built two companies before I became a venture capitalist. That is why founders trust me. I have been where they are.

I never went to college. I went to a punk rock show and started a business the next day.

I bought an airline for one ringgit. People said I was crazy. Those same people now fly AirAsia.

We started HCL with six friends and the equivalent of fifteen hundred dollars. The only asset we had was belief.

We left IBM because we wanted to build software our way. Fifty years later, I think we made the right call.

I spent 30 minutes searching for a ballet class in New York City and gave up. That frustration became ClassPass.

My son is now an entrepreneur. That's what you're called when you don't have a job.

I grew up in the Bronx with nothing. I had a vision of how I wanted the world to look, and I built it.

The best investment I ever made was a $1,000 truck.

The shale revolution didn't happen because of big oil companies. It happened because of wildcatters like me who were willing to take the risk.

I started Lululemon because the clothes people wore to yoga were terrible. That's the whole origin story.

If you build a product that works, people will find you.

Founders should never give up control of their companies. That's my biggest regret.

Chase the vision, not the money. The money will end up following you.

I was one of the co-founders of Ethereum. And then I wasn't. Sometimes the best things come from the worst days.

Selling Flipkart was the hardest day of my life. But staying was no longer an option.

If the infrastructure does not exist, build it yourself. That is the Flipkart lesson.

Six thousand dollars and two guys in an apartment. That is all it takes if the idea is right.

If you want to understand where the Middle East is going, do not watch the oil price. Watch what the young people are building.

My grandfather started this business with a handshake and a belief in Qatar's future. We are still building on that handshake.

I started with nothing but my hands and my faith. Everything after that was God's blessing and hard work.

Find what people need. Get there before everyone else. Then serve them better than anyone else could.

The MTN deal was not the end of our story. It was the capital that let us start the real one.

When you have built something from nothing once, you know that losing everything is not the end. It is just the beginning of another chapter.

The question for Africa's entrepreneurs is not whether the opportunity is there. The question is whether you are willing to go first.

Africa is not a charity project. It is the world's most exciting business opportunity, and the people who get there first will win.

Speed is the advantage. If you wait until every condition is perfect, someone else builds the houses.

Lebanon taught me that resilience is not a choice. It is a business requirement.

I had to fight for everything I got. But I never asked for a seat at the table. I bought one.

I came to New York with five hundred dollars and a car. I had no connections. I figured that out as I went.

I spent 40 years building tools for employers. I wish I had gone independent 20 years sooner.

Artists and entrepreneurs are the same. They see what does not exist yet and make it real.

Being a third-generation entrepreneur is not about protecting the legacy. It is about transforming it.

Anyone who tells you roofing materials are boring has never tried to sell them in 105 countries.

We started TechnoNIKOL in 1992 with an idea and borrowed equipment. Russia was chaos. That was exactly the right moment to start.

You can come from anywhere and build something in Britain. The system is not perfect, but it is more open than people think.

The IIT taught me to solve hard problems with limited resources. That is exactly what building a financial company from scratch requires.

If you wait for perfect regulatory clarity in India, you will wait forever. You build, you adjust, and you stay honest. That is the only formula that works.

You do not wait for opportunity in this business. You build the machine that creates opportunity. Then you invite others in.

Own the real estate. Do not rent it. That is true in property, in media, in your career. If you are performing on someone else's platform, you are enriching them.

I came to America with next to nothing. The system here works if you are willing to outwork everybody else.

We started Atlassian on $10,000 of credit card debt. We never really planned to raise VC money — it just became a habit.

The money follows the mission. If you are solving a real problem at scale, the returns tend to take care of themselves.

We started Atlassian because we wanted to work together. We had no idea what we were building. We just knew we wanted to build something.

The best founders solve their own problems. I was a young person who hated credit cards. That turned out to be a $29 billion insight.

I grew up in Brooklyn. We didn't worry about what might go wrong. We worried about what we could build.

I bought a store with borrowed money and a lot of nerve. That is still the best business plan I ever wrote.

At eBay, I realized that technology could be a great equalizer — that it could give ordinary people access to markets and opportunities that only large corporations had before.

The biggest risk of all is not taking one.

Philanthropy is not charity. It is investment in human capital at scale. If we do not create jobs and skills, no amount of aid fixes the problem.

I left one of the best jobs in the world because I believed I could build something. That is the immigrant's calculation — you bet on yourself because no one else will.

India has hundreds of millions of potential entrepreneurs who have never had access to capital or mentorship. That is not a social problem. That is an economic opportunity the size of a continent.

Entrepreneurship is not about big ideas. It is about solving a real problem better than anyone else and refusing to stop until you do.

The Rs 10,000 I gave my husband was not an investment. It was faith in a dream. The returns came to India, not to me.

My Rs 5,000 loan taught me that you do not need much money to start something meaningful. You need an idea that serves people, and the stubbornness to keep going.

When I started, people said I was making a mistake by working with weavers from lower castes. I said I was building a business. Forty years later, the business proved who was right.

My dad started with one gas station. The entire growth of Pilot was built on one very simple idea — take care of the customer.

I came to America with $50 in my pocket. The American dream is real. If you work hard and you have a vision, this country rewards that.

Leaving Facebook was the right move. I wanted to build something from scratch. That is a different experience from building inside a rocket ship.

I left Harvard Business School in my first year to start Yelp. That was the best educational decision of my life.

We did not set out to be disruptive. We set out to solve a real problem. The disruption was just what happened when the solution worked.

Getting fired was the best thing that ever happened to me. It forced me to answer a question I had been avoiding: what do I actually want to build?

I have never defined myself by a job title or a company name. I am a problem-solver. Companies just pay me to do that at scale.

I left college because I could see the web was going to change everything. I have made the same bet three times now. The pattern recognition gets easier.

I built Gucci. But Gucci wasn't mine. The second time, I made sure the thing I built was mine. That changes how you think about every decision.

You have to own what you build. The moment you give someone else control, you've made a decision about what matters most to you.

When you leave, what you built belongs to someone else. That's the deal. Understanding that deal changes everything about how you work.

My father was a farmer. He worked very hard and had very little. I decided I would work just as hard and build something that could not be taken away.

Going public is not freedom. It is a different kind of cage. I prefer to own the company completely.

I did not set out to be a businesswoman. I set out to not be broke.

Abandon anything about your life and habits that might be holding you back. Learn what you are afraid of and do it.

I started this company at 53. People thought that was mad. I thought it was exactly the right time.

Authenticity is not a strategy. It is what happens when you stop pretending.

I started with false lashes because I genuinely could not find good ones. The best businesses start with a problem you personally cannot solve.

I did not know I was building a brand. I was just sharing what I loved.

I've been preparing for this for 30 years. You don't rush something you've built your whole life around.

I had rosacea and I could not find a product that made me feel like myself. So I built it.

I got rejected by QVC seven times. Seven. And then they finally said yes — and I cried on live television and sold out in ten minutes.

We started this in our apartment with $25,000 and no connections and no retail shelf space. I am proof that the conventional path is not the only path.

We started with $700 and I had no home. What you have matters less than what you believe.

Being well-groomed and well-dressed is a business decision. It tells people before you open your mouth that you take yourself seriously.

I was rejected so many times that rejection became normal. It stopped scaring me. That is when everything changed.

If you want to change an industry, you can't ask permission.

I started Oakley with $300. That's it. Three hundred dollars.

I was the last guy out of the locker room every day — not because I was the worst player, but because I was solving the cotton problem.

In the oil business, you learn quickly that not every well comes in. You accept uncertainty as part of the equation before you ever turn a drill bit.

I am not a speculator. I build things. That is a very different business.

We were completely wrong about one thing. We built a terminal to import gas, not export it. But getting it wrong was the best thing that ever happened to us.

You cannot build a ten-billion-dollar piece of infrastructure unless you are willing to look completely ridiculous for a very long time.

You have to be a little bit stubborn in this business. A lot of people quit right before they find what they are looking for.

Every entrepreneur faces setbacks. What separates those who succeed from those who don't is how you respond when things go wrong.

My father started with nothing and built an empire. That spirit — that hunger — is in our DNA and it will carry us forward.

Steve and I used to talk about changing the world back at Reed. Neither of us imagined how different our paths would look from the outside.

Selling FedMart was a mistake. Not because the price was wrong but because I hadn't finished what I started.

I borrowed the money, I built the platform, I wrote the odds. It was not a team effort in the beginning. It was just work.

We built Bet365 in Stoke because that is where we are from. I do not see any reason to be anywhere else.

Jorge Paulo taught us that dreaming big is not optional. If you are going to build something, build something that matters.

My father started with nothing. He built something real. All I did was make sure it kept growing.

I never set out to become a billionaire. I set out to solve a problem. The financial outcome was a consequence of getting the science right.

I learned to breathe fire on the street to survive. I will figure out the next chapter the same way — one performance at a time.

We arrived in Los Angeles with no money, no return ticket, and an agreement that if the show flopped we would disband. We had nothing to lose — and that is exactly the right state of mind for doing something that has never been done before.