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I realised that being a mother is similar to being an entrepreneur. You set up a system that is your family and you invest... you take risks and you actually have the most important job of rearing up the future of not just your family or an individual, but of the entire world. That is a tough and risky job.
For almost the first year of The Muse's life, I would do 5 to 8 networking events a week. And I don't necessarily think that's the right path for everyone, but I realized that as an entrepreneur, one of my strengths was finding the right people who could help us. I didn't come into startups with any network.
I think that if there's some innovative entrepreneurs out there who can help teach people how they can cost-effectively help themselves and their planet, I think everybody would be for it. That's going to be the challenge - figuring a way to get the marketplace and commerce to teach us consumers another way.
I've never isolated role models based on gender. I have more male role models due to the mere fact that I've done business with more of them and they're leaders within the verticals I work. Of those, Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com, is an entrepreneur and personal friend that I have a great deal of respect for.
Profit is vital to human well-being. Profit is the payment to entrepreneurs just as wages are payments to labor, interest to capital and rent to land. In order to earn profits in free markets, entrepreneurs must identify and satisfy human wants and do so in a way that economizes on society's scarce resources.
So many black kids aspire to be entertainers or professional athletes because those are the only role models they see that look like them. There are only 300 jobs in the NBA but an endless amount of opportunities as an entrepreneur. With enough hustle, entrepreneurship opens doors to a world of opportunities.
To be a designer today is to be an entrepreneur. Whether you're a two-man operation in Shoreditch or a 3,000-person, vertically integrated brand, you need to have the wherewithal to run your business through investment, considering everything from start-up funds to your exit plan or what it takes to go public.
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.
There is much that public policy can do to support American entrepreneurs. Health insurance reform will make it easier for entrepreneurs to take a chance on a new business without putting their family's health at risk. Tort reform will make it easier to take prudent risks on new products in a number of sectors.
As an entrepreneur, one of the biggest challenges you will face will be building your brand. The ultimate goal is to set your company and your brand apart from the crowd. If you form a strategy without doing the research, your brand will barely float - and at the speed industries move at today, brands sink fast.
Believe it or not, the first spark for everything I've done today came down to me meeting one person in college who changed my life. A student named Anthony Adams who lived across the hall from me in our freshman dorm showed me what it meant to be an 'entrepreneur' when I saw him launch his own start-up company.
[Successful] projects that entrepreneurs initiated and carried through had one essential quality. All had been thoroughly contemplated by the regnant experts and dominant companies, with their large research staffs and financial resources, and had been judged too difficult, untimely, risky, expensive and unprofitable.
The consumers are merciless. They never buy in order to benefit a less efficient producer and to protect him against the consequences of his failure to manage better. They want to be served as well as possible. And the working of the capitalist system forces the entrepreneur to obey the orders issued by the consumers.
I think the hallmark of a really good entrepreneur is that you're not really going to build one specific company. The goal - at least the way I think about entrepreneurship - is you realize one day that you can't really work for anyone else. You have to start your own thing. It almost doesn't matter what that thing is.
Perhaps our most debilitating rut as a culture is a dependence on experts. Until we kick this dependency, how can we rise above the statistics and become a nation of entrepreneurs and leaders? The answer, as challenging as it is, is for entrepreneurs to show us the way, and to keep at it until more of us start to heed.
It's harder, but we're still finding oil in Oklahoma today. The bar has been raised on startup companies, but it can still be done. Every regulation and every rule limits you, but, yes, it can still be done. That's the beauty of living in a free country and having the freedom to have an idea and become an entrepreneur.
A firm, therefore, consists of the system of relationships which comes into existence when the direction of resources is dependent on an entrepreneur... As a firm gets larger, there may be decreasing returns to the entrepreneur function, that is, the costs of organising additional transactions within the firm may rise.
As an entrepreneur, it's easy to feel ownership over every aspect of your business because you're putting your reputation, your money, and other people's money on the line. Oh, and you're sleeping, breathing, and eating your passion project - that, too. But if you try to do it all yourself, you're almost certain to fail.
Anyone who wants to be an entrepreneur like someone else is actually looking in the wrong direction. You don't look out for inspiration, you look in. You have to ask yourself how can I be better today, at solving the problem I am trying to solve for my company. I wouldn't encourage anyone to be like me. Just be like you.
I consider myself an inventor first and an entrepreneur second. In real life, my hero is Thomas Edison. He was a great inventor, but also an outstanding entrepreneur who was able to sell his inventions to the masses. He didn't just develop the light bulb; he invented the entire electric grid and power distribution system.
The riches of the rich are not the cause of the poverty of anybody; the process that makes some people rich is, on the contrary, the corollary of the process that improves many peoples want satisfaction. The entrepreneurs, the capitalists and the technologists prosper as far as they succeed in best supplying the consumers.
It's a great story for us whenever an entrepreneur makes a crazy amount of money and we get to tell the world about it. For the entrepreneur? Not so much. Hitherto unknown relatives, entrepreneurs seeking angel investments, money managers and supposed baby-mamas all come out of the woodwork with dollar signs in their eyes.
I think a great entrepreneur is learning every day. An entrepreneur is somebody that doesn't take no for an answer - they're going to figure something out. They also take responsibility. They don't blame anybody else. And they're dreamers in one sense but they're also realistic and they take affordable steps when they can.
Growing up in a group home, and with an undiagnosed learning disability to boot, the odds of success were not on my side. But when I joined the high school football team, I learned the value of discipline, focus, persistence, and teamwork - all skills that have proven vital to my career as a C.E.O. and social entrepreneur.
Great entrepreneurs focus intensely on an opportunity where others see nothing. This focus and intensity helps to eliminate wasted effort and distractions. Most companies die from indigestion rather than starvation, i.e. companies suffer from doing too many things at the same time rather than doing too few things very well.
An entrepreneur is somebody who is taking bold risks, is often doing things that have never been done before, trying to do things better. And an adventurer is challenging themselves, often doing things that have never been done before, seeing what they're capable of. In both cases, you've got to protect against the downside.
I don't think it ever occurred to me that I wouldn't be an entrepreneur. My dad became a real estate developer, and that work is usually project-based. You attract investors for a project with a certain life cycle, and then you move on to the next thing. It's almost like being a serial entrepreneur, so I had that as an example.
I have to do the work of self-love and affirmation, and say, "I am a woman, I am a person of color, I am the granddaughter of immigrants, I am also the descendant of slaves, I am a mother, I am an entrepreneur, I am an artist, and I'm joyful." And maybe in seeing my joy, you can finish your sentence with, "And I am joyful too."
In December 1989, my mother died very suddenly, and that sparked a re-evaluation of what I was doing, and I realized I was mediocre at everything. I was a mediocre IBM employee, I was a mediocre entrepreneur, I was a mediocre artist. I decided that, although my mom wouldn't be around to see it, I wanted to be great at something.
The worst example of rural poverty is that of migrant farm workers. They have no permanent jobs, so they have no equity in the places where they work. They're not shareholders, let alone entrepreneurs. They're not small farmers, they're not market gardeners, they're just temporary - uprooted, isolated, easily exploitable people.
By all indications, American business leaders are more adept at creating business strategies than they are skilled at human capital management. American entrepreneurs are world-beaters when it comes to creating new businesses, and corporate managers are adept at using the latest marketing, financial, and technological practices.
I want to create an environment where I can create technology, get it into the hands of someone to market it, and move on to other technologies so I can keep innovating. I want to be a serial entrepreneur: Incubate an idea, get it to a good state, and make that an enabler to get to the next state. It's every researcher's fantasy.
People do not look at the music business as an entrepreneur business at all times, but everything in this business is entrepreneurship. It's one thing to have the money and not have the knowledge. A lot of times people have great ideas, but don't have a plan. The whole thing about being an entrepreneur is you have to have a plan.
The biggest mistake entrepreneurs can make is trying to do everything themselves. They usually blow up when they try. I did an inventory of every deal I've ever done and it turned out that every single deal I made money on was a partnership, and every colossal failure, where I lost millions, was something I tried to do by myself.
Outside the firm, price movements direct production, which is co-ordinated through a series of exchange transactions on the market. Within a firm, these market transactions are eliminated and in place of the complicated market structure with exchange transactions is substituted the entrepreneur-co-ordinator, who directs production.
All the rejection that I've been through only made me stronger, and it's part of being an entrepreneur. You kind of have to take the kid gloves off and let them feel it because it's not going to be the first time that someone's going to say "no" or close a door in your face. You're going to have to figure out how to burst through it.
A friend of mine, a Hispanic entrepreneur asked me a question sometime ago, he said, 'When is the last time you saw a Hispanic panhandler?' I think it's a great question. I'll tell you, in my life I've never once have seen a Hispanic panhandler, because in our community, it would be viewed as shameful to be out on the street begging.
The attributes for entrepreneurs cut both ways. You need the ability to ignore inconvenient facts and see the world as it should be and not as it is. This inspires people to take huge leaps of faith. But this blindness to facts can be a liability, too. The characteristics that help entrepreneurs succeed can also lead to their failure.
Over the years, the U.S. economy has shown a remarkable ability to absorb shocks of all kinds, to recover, and to continue to grow. Flexible and efficient markets for labor and capital, an entrepreneurial tradition, and a general willingness to tolerate and even embrace technological and economic change all contribute to this resiliency.
It would be wonderful to become what Oprah has become: she is in such a class of her own, as an entrepreneur, as a performer and an icon. The idea of building a series of programmes and choosing people that I think have talent to do them would be a very interesting idea. I would love to show that television can have soul, depth and range.
Entrepreneurship is the cornerstone to African development and the key to local value creation in Africa. I am determined to ensure that Africa's next generation of entrepreneurs have the platform they need to turn their entrepreneurial aspirations into sustainable businesses that will drive economic growth and job creation across Africa.
If you want to be an entrepreneur, it's not a job, it's a lifestyle. It defines you. Forget about vacations, about going home at 6 pm - last thing at night you'll send emails, first thing in the morning you'll read emails, and you'll wake up in the middle of the night. But it's hugely rewarding as you're fulfilling something for yourself.
I started off with a company, InfoSpace, with my own funding. The company was listed among the most successful companies and I went on to start Intelius and Moon Express. Now, I focus my time on using the skills of an entrepreneur to solve many of the grand challenges facing us in the areas of education, healthcare, clean water and energy.
I've always enjoyed shopping and loved fashion, but my interest as an entrepreneur was definitely more about the opportunities I saw to change the future of retail. My sister was a buyer in New York, and she knew my body and my style, and she could find me things I loved. I thought, 'What if everybody had access to this kind of experience?'
I have been privileged to write across multiple facets of my life: to write romance novels, to write memoir, to write about leadership, and to write tax and social policy articles. The act of writing is integral to who I am. I'm a writer, a politician, a tax attorney, a civic leader, and an entrepreneur. I am proud of what I've accomplished.
It doesn't matter how many times you fail. It doesn't matter how many times you almost get it right. No-one is going to know or care about your failures, and neither should you. All you have to do is learn from them and those around you. All that matters in business is that you get it right once. Then everyone can tell you how lucky you are.
I would say, as an entrepreneur everything you do - every action you take in product development, in marketing, every conversation you have, everything you do - is an experiment. If you can conceptualize your work not as building features, not as launching campaigns, but as running experiments, you can get radically more done with less effort.
What are the most important qualities that make a successful entrepreneur? The ability to communicate. The ability to express your idea with certainty. That's how you become a leader-even if you are unsure, your ability to explain your vision and your direction is the attribute you need the most. ... Articulate your idea in 90 seconds or less.
What is called economic progress is the joint effect of the activities of the three progressive groups-or classes-of the savers, the scientist-inventors, and the entrepreneurs, operating in a market economy as far as it is not sabotaged by the endeavors of the nonprogressive majority of the routinists and the public policies supported by them.
As an entrepreneur, I've come across countless articles and quotes proudly telling me that I should accept failure, smile, and keep my head up. In other words, I've been told to stay positive. The thing is, when you're forced to shut down a business and let really awesome people you care about go, staying positive is the last thing on your mind.