Venture-backed companies create 11% of all private sector jobs. They generate annual revenues equivalent to an astounding 21% of GDP.
- Peter Thiel
Notable Quotables
Leadership must wake up every day with the mission of Finding a Better Way Every Day…There are no modest revolutions…GE was a place where the people got up everyday to searching for a better way.
- Jack Welch
A pay increase of 5 percent is more than justified. It would compensate for losses we’ve had in the past and I’d like to be able to buy the everyday things I’ve put off for years, like a new TV.
- Michael Gerber
That doesn’t mean the opposite ideas are automatically true: you can’t escape the madness of crowds by dogmatically rejecting them. Instead ask yourself: how much of what you know about business is shaped by mistaken reactions to past mistakes? The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself.
- Peter Thiel
The Green Revolution focused on the big three – maize, rice and wheat – and the Green Revolution did not adapt the big three to African conditions, other than South Africa, as much as they should have.
- Bill Gates
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
If You Want to Gather Honey, Don’t Kick Over the Beehive.
- Dale Carnegie
If you don’t set a baseline standard for what you’ll accept in life, you’ll find it’s easy to slip into behaviors and attitudes or a quality of life that’s far below what you deserve.
- Anthony Robbins
Successful storytelling builds brand equity, and businesses with high brand equity don’t need to draw as much attention to themselves and their achievements as those that are still establishing their value to the customer.
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Big companies have always needed and cooperated in areas where it made sense.
- Larry Page
Paper money will suffer. I’d be in mortar, not paper (money). We are in a time when paper investments are riskier than in the past. There is also a great amount of sovereign risk.
- Lee Shau Kee
I think a big test we all face in life on a regular basis is that discouragement test. Life’s not always fair, but I believe if you keep doing the right thing, God will get you to where you are.
- Joel Olsteen
If a business does well, the stock eventually follows.
- Warren Buffett
The economy of Hong Kong was considerably stable in 2000. However, as the global economy experienced a slowdown since the beginning of 2001, the confidence of local home purchasers remained low notwithstanding that Hong Kong followed the footsteps of the United States of America in announcing consecutive reductions of interest rates as well as a series of measures implemented by the Government to stabilise local property prices.
- Lee Shau Kee
Catering to a mass audience usually backfires. Instead the key thing is to stay in your lane, and if you are good enough and interesting enough, people move to you…If you never compromise, your core audience will come with you as you grow. Then you build on their loyalty and bring in other people.
- Russell Simmons
I learned that a long walk and calm conversation are an incredible combination if you want to build a bridge.
- Seth Godin
Positional leaders ignore the fact that every person has hopes, dreams, desires, and goals of his own. And leaders must bring their vision and the aspirations of the people they lead together in a way that benefits everyone.”
- John C. Maxwell
If there is to be a low-cost Uber, Uber will be the low-cost Uber.
- Travis Kalanick
You can’t fault government for seizing that opportunity. But it has an impact on Barbados’ current account deficit and it does bring with it attended risks. And, therefore, you have to ask whether or not the tourism business that is going to be generated from the publicity around the cricket matches will be sustained after the cricket matches are over.
- John Chambers
The idea that everyone should slavishly work so they do something inefficiently so they keep their job – that just doesn’t make any sense to me. That can’t be the right answer.
- Larry Page
Don’t save it all for the end. There is every reason not to.
- Timothy Ferriss
[On his son Matt dying in 2004 in a scuba diving accident] It aged me much faster than anything you can imagine…
- Phil Knight
Through the right people focusing on the right things, we can, in time, get on top of a lot if not most of the problems of this world. And that’s what a number of us are trying to do.
- Richard Branson
SpaceX is only 12 years old now. Between now and 2040, the company’s lifespan will have tripled. If we have linear improvement in technology, as opposed to logarithmic, then we should have a significant base on Mars, perhaps with thousands or tens of thousands of people.
- Elon Musk
Our culture is friendly and intense, but if push comes to shove we’ll settle for intense.
- Jeff Bezos
The legendary French aviation pioneer and author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote: I have no right to say or do anything that diminishes a man in his own eyes. What matters is not what I think of him, but what he thinks of himself. Hurting a man in his dignity is a crime.
- Dale Carnegie
Most of us have never felt at a disadvantage because we did not receive any inheritance. About 80 percent of us are first-generation affluent.
- Thomas J Stanley
When you put faith, hope and love together, you can raise positive kids in a negative world.
- Zig Ziglar
The Secret Make up your mind that no matter what comes your way, no matter how difficult, no matter how unfair, you will do more than simply survive. You will thrive in spite of it.
- Joel Olsteen
The most stable companies have strong leaders at every level of the organization. The only way to develop such widespread leadership is to make developing leaders a part of your culture. That is a strong part of Coca-Cola’s legacy.
- John Maxwell
The boy you trained, gone he is. Consumed by Darth Vader.
- Yoda
Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued.
- Socrates
I believe we are in a world where innovation in stuff was outlawed. It was basically outlawed in the last 40 years – part of it was environmentalism, part of it was risk aversion.
- Peter Thiel
Your job is not to judge. Your job is not to figure out if someone deserves something. Your job is to lift the fallen, to restore the broken, and to heal the hurting.
- Joel Olsteen
You have to be pretty driven to make it happen. Otherwise, you will just make yourself miserable.
- Elon Musk
The moral systems of religion, I think, are super important.
- Bill Gates
I believe that every single event in life happens in an opportunity to choose love over fear.
- Oprah Winfrey
Companies should not have a singular view of profitability. There needs to be a balance between commerce and social responsibility… The companies that are authentic about it will wind up as the companies that make more money.
- Howard Schultz
60% of the bonus was based on financials and 40% on Six Sigma (quality) results.
- Jack Welch
I’d rather have 1% of 100 people’s efforts than 100% of my own.
- John D. Rockefeller
Make your team feel respected, empowered and genuinely excited about the company’s mission.
- Tim Westergren
The only question with wealth is, what do you do with it?
- John D. Rockefeller
You may have heard of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. There’s another day you might want to know about: Giving Tuesday. The idea is pretty straightforward. On the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, shoppers take a break from their gift-buying and donate what they can to charity.
- Bill Gates
I don’t want to kill ads. I think advertising is great, and I’m very aware that there’s multiple revenue streams in television, subscription and advertising. But I also don’t want to put my head in the sand, and I think the world is changing.
- Charles Ergen
Business ends up being very dynamic and situational.
- Ben Horowitz
The doctors actually told my family there was a five percent chance of me living.
- Ed Clark
Don’t waste your time trying to win people over that can never be won over.
- Joel Olsteen
It takes a decade to grow trees but a century to nurture human beings.
- Cheng Yu-tung
New customers are silver…loyal customers are gold.
- Anonymous
In our day Capital, Business Ability, and Manual Labor are the legs of a three-legged stool. While the three legs stand sound and firm, the stool stands; but let any one of the three weaken and break, let it be pulled out or struck out, down goes the stool to the ground. And the stool is of no use until the third leg is restored.
- Andrew Carnegie
To a child love is spelled T-I-M-E.
- Zig Ziglar
I could either watch it happen or be a part of it.
- Elon Musk
Like my friend Warren Buffett, I feel particularly lucky to do something every day that I love to do. He calls it ‘tap-dancing to work.
- Bill Gates
Every dream I’ve ever had in life has come true ten times over.
- Steve Wozniak
In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative, original thinker unless you can also sell what you create.
- David Ogilvy
Xiaomi looks a bit like Apple but is really more like Amazon with some elements of Google.
- Lei Jun
A public-opinion poll is no substitute for thought.
- Warren Buffett
I believe life is a series of near misses. A lot of what we ascribe to luck is not luck at all. It’s seizing the day and accepting responsibility for your future. It’s seeing what other people don’t see And pursuing that vision.
- Howard Schultz
We sleep safely at night because rough men stand ready to visit violence on those who would harm us.
- Winston Churchill
I own my business. My business doesn’t own me.
- Cherie Ve Ard
Japan has only 100m people. Asia has 4bn. At least one-third, maybe nearly half, will become middle class, and this is a big opportunity for Japanese businessmen.
- Tadashi Yanai
The guy keeps making speeches about redistribution and maybe we ought to do something to businesses that don’t invest, their holding too much money. We haven’t heard that kind of talk except from pure socialists. Everybody’s afraid of the government and there’s no need soft peddling it, it’s the truth. It is the truth.
- Stephen Wynn
Innovations that are guided by smallholder farmers, adapted to local circumstances, and sustainable for the economy and environment will be necessary to ensure food security in the future.
- Bill Gates
I do probably 60 concerts a year in the States. And I go out to clubs in the week. I’m doing new stuff all the time.
- Jerry Seinfeld
They that soar too high, often fall hard, making a low and level Dwelling preferable. The tallest Trees are most in the Power of the Winds, and Ambitious Men of the Blasts of Fortune. Buildings have need of a good Foundation, that lie so much exposed to the Weather.
- Dale Carnegie
The librarian isn’t a clerk who happens to work in a library. A librarian is a data hound, a guide, a sherpa and a teacher. The librarian is the interface between reams of data and the untrained but motivated user.
- Seth Godin
Any time is a good time to start a company.
- Ron Conway
We believe that according the name ‘investors’ to institutions that trade actively is like calling someone who repeatedly engages in one-night stands a ‘romantic.’
- Warren Buffett
If a hurricane strikes, we can blame the president for not being there; we can blame Congress and FEMA; we can blame the state governments; but in the end, it’s the mayors and the local city governments that have to be prepared for emergencies and be prepared to act.
- Michael Bloomberg
I try to make myself happy, no, because I know that if I’m not happy, my colleagues are not happy and my shareholders are not happy and my customers are not happy.
- Jack Ma
If you want enemies, excel your friends; but if you want friends, let your friends excel you.
- Dale Carnegie
Drones overall will be more impactful than I think people recognize, in positive ways to help society.
- Bill Gates
…What I have denied and what my reason compels me to deny, is the existence of a Being throned above us as a god, directing our mundane affairs in detail, regarding us as individuals, punishing us, rewarding us as human judges might. When the churches learn to take this rational view of things, when they become true schools of ethics and stop teaching fables, they will be more effective than they are to-day… If they would turn all that ability to teaching this one thing – the fact that honesty is best, that selfishness and lies of any sort must surely fail to produce happiness – they would accomplish actual things. Religious faiths and creeds have greatly hampered our development. They have absorbed and wasted some fine intellects. That creeds are getting to be less and less important to the average mind with every passing year is a good sign, I think, although I do not wish to talk about what is commonly called theology. The criticisms which have been hurled at me have not worried me. A man cannot control his beliefs. If he is honest in his frank expression of them, that is all that can in justice be required of him. Professor Thomson and a thousand others do not in the least agree with me. His criticism of me, as I read it, charged that because I doubted the soul’s immortality, or ‘personality,’ as he called it, my mind must be abnormal, ‘pathological,’ in other, words, diseased… I try to say exactly what I honestly believe to be the truth, and more than that no man can do. I honestly believe that creedists have built up a mighty structure of inaccuracy, based, curiously, on those fundamental truths which I, with every honest man, must not alone admit but earnestly acclaim. I have been working on the same lines for many years. I have tried to go as far as possible toward the bottom of each subject I have studied. I have not reached my conclusions through study of traditions; I have reached them through the study of hard fact. I cannot see that unproved theories or sentiment should be permitted to have influence in the building of conviction upon matters so important. Science proves its theories or it rejects them. I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious theories of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God. I earnestly believe that I am right; I cannot help believing as I do… I cannot accept as final any theory which is not provable. The theories of the theologians cannot be proved. Proof, proof! That is what I always have been after; that is what my mind requires before it can accept a theory as fact. Some things are provable, some things disprovable, some things are doubtful. All the problems which perplex us, now, will, soon or late, be solved, and solved beyond a question through scientific investigation. The thing which most impresses me about theology is that it does not seem to be investigating. It seems to be asserting, merely, without actual study. …Moral teaching is the thing we need most in this world, and many of these men could be great moral teachers if they would but give their whole time to it, and to scientific search for the rock-bottom truth, instead of wasting it upon expounding theories of theology which are not in the first place firmly based. What we need is search for fundamentals, not reiteration of traditions born in days when men knew even less than we do now.
- Thomas Edison
I think Tesla will most likely develop its own autopilot system for the car, as I think it should be camera-based, not Lidar-based. However, it is also possible that we do something jointly with Google.
- Elon Musk
Play long enough and you might get lucky. In the technology game, tomorrow looks nothing like today. If you survive long enough to see tomorrow, it may bring you the answer that seems so impossible today.
- Ben Horowitz
The resentment that criticism engenders can demoralize employees, family members and friends, and still not correct the situation that has been condemned.
- Dale Carnegie
For those that have fixed exchange-rate regimes, you will need a greater amount of foreign reserves. That’s the case in Belize, it’s the case in the Eastern Caribbean zone and it’s also the case in Barbados. In those cases, the level of reserve coverage is one of credit weakness. Where you have a bit more flexibility in the exchange rate ? for instance, Jamaica ? you would require a smaller amount of international reserves.
- John Chambers
Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.
- Bill Gates
I was trying to convince all these men to try to make a product that they didn’t even wear! Or if they did wear them, they were not admitting it! There was the problem right there. No wonder their hosiery was so uncomfortable.
- Sara Blakely
I’m trying to throw a big broad net to try to get people interested in God and believe that He’s for them and has a purpose.
- Joel Olsteen
Quality is much better than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles.
- Steve Jobs
When sales people don’t know what to do, they talk. The ordinary salesperson vomits the presentation onto the Buyer’s desktop.
- Jerry Vass
Choose a job that you like, and you will never have to work a day in your life.
- Confucius
At our computer club, we talked about it being a revolution. Computers were going to belong to everyone, and give us power, and free us from the people who owned computers and all that stuff.
- Steve Wozniak
No one ever wants to see his or her name linked to anything bad. Conscience is like a baby. It has to go to sleep before you can.
- Harvey Mackay
Baseball is like cricket, and I grew up in a country where they had cricket. So I understand cricket, soccer and basketball. I played basketball at the club level and a little bit in college, so that’s why I’m a basketball fanatic.
- Patrick Soon-Shiong
By combining broadband Internet, phone and video services over a single cable line, we are taking a major step towards implementing future integrated data, voice and video telecommunications on a mass market scale.
- John Chambers
I DECLARE God is going before me making crooked places straight. He has already lined up the right people, the right opportunities and solutions to problems I haven’t had. No person, no sickness, no disappointment, can stop His plan. What he promised will come to pass.
- Joel Olsteen
I was an executive running a pretty substantial group before becoming CEO, and I had no idea what it was like. When something goes wrong, people say, ‘It’s all your fault.’ Your reaction is, ‘It’s not my fault.’ But what do you mean? I was the founder, I hired everybody in the company, I was managing it.
- Ben Horowitz
There is no doubt that it is around the family and the home that all the greatest virtues, the most dominating virtues of human, are created, strengthened and maintained.
- Winston Churchill
So far as the religion of the day is concerned, it is a damned fake … Religion is all bunk.
- Thomas Edison
Change almost never fails because it’s too early. It almost always fails because it’s too late.
- Seth Godin
The thing I lose patience with the most is the clock. Its hands move too fast.
- Thomas Edison
The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into smaller manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.
- Mark Twain
Disruptive companies often pick fights they can’t win.
- Peter Thiel
(In reference to one of his first advertising sales mentors Howard Davis)… He was 6 foot 4 with silver hair…the quintessential advertising guy. He had a glass topped desk in his office because, as he put it, he like to be able to look down and see his Guccis while he worked. Howard taught me to get things done. He was very smart but he was also an animal. He exuded power and he could be very intimidating, and he knew how to use his power to get results while still managing to be a good guy. Howard’s personal style was very different from my own, but what he did teach me was how to create a sense of urgency, how to motivate performance by getting everyone’s heart pounding.
- David Novak
Encouragement and hope are the two most powerful qualities any person can provide to others.
- Zig Ziglar
You may have made some mistakes, and you may not be where you want to be, but that has NOTHING to do with your future.
- Zig Ziglar
America is built around this premise that you can do it, and there are an awful lot of people who are unlikely to have done it who did.
- Michael Bloomberg
We want the brand to stand for the same thing all over the world
- Phil Knight
