133 quotes from 10 great web entrepreneurs

Read on for a collection of some of the most inspiring quotes from the world’s greatest web entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurship, often described as an adventure, makes for an exciting and fascinating journey. Sometimes it gives you a sense of personal freedom but almost always gives you the satisfaction of being part of collective action.

The 10 entrepreneurs you will discover in this article are, above all, shaping the world of tomorrow. How? By having embraced technology as a means to undertake, innovate, and thus change the world.

Each of these web entrepreneurs makes up today the big names among web entrepreneurship and the general public worldwide. They had the courage of their ideas, explored the unknown in the early days of the Internet, seized the opportunities as well as weathered the setbacks of the technological revolution, and they persevered. What they learned along the way cannot be taught in the classrooms of any business school (including any Ivy League classroom). What they have learned is something you have to live through, and that you acquire only through experience.

These 133 quotes from 10 great web entrepreneurs not only reflect the lessons learned throughout their lives, but also their ideas, thought processes, and keynotes from their speeches. They are loaded with gems. Reading or listening to them is almost a magical experience…

Enjoy!

1. Quotes from Mark Zuckerberg – Facebook

“In a world that’s changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.”
“People think innovation is just having a good idea but a lot of it is just moving quickly and trying a lot of things.”
“I think a simple rule of business is, if you do the things that are easier first, then you can actually make a lot of progress.”
“I am a firm believer that you never do anything great by doing what others do or by doing what has always been done before.”
“My goal was never to just create a company. A lot of people misinterpret that, as if I don’t care about revenue or profit or any of those things. But what not being just a company means to me is not being just that – building something that actually makes a really big change in the world.”
“In the long run, you only make progress if you have exceptional people around you.”
“If you risk nothing, you risk everything.”
“Everyone has a unique perspective that they can bring to the world.”
“The key in everything we do is to prioritize. That is, to identify what is important for us to address, and to stick to it. Working hard, right here, right now, on what really matters is always the best use of time.”
“Building a mission and building a business go hand-in-hand.”
“Simply put: we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.”
“I’m trying to make the world a more open place by helping people connect and share.”
“When you give everyone a voice and give people power, the system usually ends up in a really good place. So, what we view our role as, is giving people that power.”

2. Quotes from Jeff Bezos – Amazon

“I knew the only thing I could regret was not trying.”
“In the end, we are our choices.”
“We’re not competitor obsessed, we’re customer obsessed.”
“Things never go right.”
“If you can’t tolerate critics, don’t do anything new or interesting.”
“People who are right most of the time are people who change their minds often.”
“What’s dangerous is not to evolve.”
“Your brand is what other people say when you’re not in the same room as them.”
“Most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow.”
“Work hard, have fun, make history.”
“Happiness depends 80% on the person you choose to accompany you through life.”
“Don’t just listen to customers – also invent on their behalf.”
“In the business world we often ask this question: ‘why’?
It’s a good question, but there’s an equally good question: ‘why not’?”
“If you decide that you’re going to do only the things you know are going to work, you’re going to leave a lot of opportunity on the table.”
“I believe you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you’re going to innovate.”
“In the old world, you devoted 30% of your time to building a great service and 70% of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts.”
“Intelligence is a gift, kindness is a choice.”
“Your brand is formed primarily, not by what your company says about itself, but by what the company does.”
“We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details.”

3. Quotes from Brian Chesky – Airbnb

“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.”
“Culture is so incredibly important because it is the foundation for all future innovation. People with passion can change the world.”
“Our ‘overnight’ success took 1,000 days.”
“If you want to create a great product, just focus on one person. Make that one person have the most amazing experience ever.”
“Everyone’s got a moment or two in their life where something happens, and you make a decision and then your entire life changes.”
“Culture is simply a shared way of doing something with a passion.”
“Designers and artists see potential in things where others do not. I think artists in many ways are the original entrepreneurs.”
“I’m not saying the whole world will work this way, but with Airbnb, people are sleeping in other people’s homes and other people’s beds. So there’s a level of trust necessary to participate that’s different from an eBay or Facebook.”
“Whatever career you’re in, assume it’s going to be a massive failure. That way, you’re not making decisions based on success, money, and career. You’re only making it based on doing what you love.”
“Don’t listen to your parents.”
“What I’ve been surprised by is not how different people are, but how similar they are.”

4. Quotes from Jack Dorsay – Twitter

“The greatest lesson that I learned in all of this is that you have to start. Start now, start here, and start small. Keep it Simple.”
“Success is never accidental.”
“Build what you want to see in the world.”
“Make every detail perfect and limit the number of details to perfect.”
“An idea that can change the course of business can come from anywhere.”
“It’s really complex to make something simple.”
“Starting anything is a roller coaster with the highest highs and lowest lows.”
“Life happens at intersections.”
“The strongest thing you can cultivate as an entrepreneur is to not rely on luck but cultivating an ability to recognize fortunate situations when they are occurring.”
“Short-term satisfaction will never lead to something timeless.”
“My goal is to simplify complexity. I just want to build stuff that really simplifies our base human interaction.”
“Twitter is the world.”
“You don’t have to start from scratch to do something interesting. You don’t have to start from scratch to have a massive impact on the world. And you have to have a good idea. You have to convince other people of those good ideas. And you have to push as quickly as possible.”
“I think that great programming is not all that dissimilar to great art. Once you start thinking in concepts of programming it makes you a better person…as does learning a foreign language, as does learning math, as does learning how to read.”
“Twitter has been my life’s work in many senses. It started with a fascination with cities and how they work, and what’s going on in them right now.”

5. Quotes from Reid Hoffman – Linkedin

“Great opportunities almost never fit your schedule.”
“It’s better to be the best connected than the most connected.”
“The future is sooner and stranger than you think.”
“Ironically, in a changing world, playing it safe is one of the riskiest things you can do.”
“The fastest way to change yourself is to hang out with people who are already the way you want to be.”
“No matter how brilliant your mind or strategy, if you’re playing a solo game, you’ll always lose out to a team.”
“If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched it too late.”
“What is an entrepreneur? Someone who will jump off a cliff and assemble an airplane on the way down.”
“Difficult economic times are good times to invest in the future.”
“People who take risk intelligently can usually actually make a lot more progress than people who don’t.”
“Innovation comes from long-term thinking and iterative execution.”
“Society flourishes when people think entrepreneurially.”
“People will be discovering that the Internet helps their career. One of my theses is that every individual is now a small business; how you manage your own personal career is the exact way you manage a small business. Your brand matters. This is how LinkedIn operates.”
“Opportunities do not float like clouds. They are firmly attached to individuals. If you’re looking for an opportunity, you’re really looking for people. If you’re evaluating an opportunity, you’re really evaluating people.”
“Your network is the people who want to help you, and you want to help them.”
“I get energy from one-on-one conversations most often, and I lose energy from group conversations most often.”

6. Quotes from Jack Ma – Alibaba

“Learn tactics and skills from others, but do not transform your dream.”»
“Whatever you do, regardless of failure or success, experience is a form of success in itself.”
“Never give up. Today is hard, tomorrow will be worse, but the day after tomorrow will be sunshine.
“If you put bananas and money in front of monkeys, monkeys will choose bananas because monkeys do not know that money can buy a lot of bananas. In reality, if you offer a job and business to people, they will choose the job because most people do not know that business can bring more money than wages.”
“A leader should have higher grit and tenacity and be able to endure what the employees can’t.”
“Find the right people, not the best people.”
“Giving up is the greatest failure.”
“I don’t want to be liked; I want to be respected.”
“Trade is a communication of cultures and values.”
“If you’re doing business, not that simple to only buy. You have to create something. You have to create something that never exists for the future.”
“Alibaba is not just a job. It’s a dream. It’s a cause.”
“Opportunity always lies where the people complain.”
“The business schools teach a lot of skills about how to make money and how to run a business. But I want to tell people that if you want to run a business, you have to run the value first, to serve the others, to help the others – that’s the key.”
“I want to change history, do something important in my life, and influence individuals like we have with millions of small businesses on Alibaba.”

7. Quotes from Pierre Omidyar – eBay

“Don’t let people who you may respect and who you believe know what they’re talking about, don’t let them tell you it can’t be done because often they will tell you it can’t be done, and it’s just because they don’t have the courage to try.”
“You have to really believe in what you’re doing, be passionate enough about it so that you will put in the hours and hard work that it takes to actually succeed there, and then you’ll be successful.”
“Whatever future you’re building, don’t try to program everything.”
“I want people to be entrepreneurs, but I want them to do it for the right reasons, because they think they can change the world, because they think they have got something of value to give to the world. Not because they think they can make a lot of money.”
“You are able to accomplish anything you set out to accomplish.”»
“You’ll fail at some things, that’s a learning experience that you need so that you can take that on to the next experience… What you learn from those challenges and those failures are what will get you past the next ones.”
“An honest and open environment can bring out the best in people.”»
“We believe that people are fundamentally good; we believe that everyone has something to contribute. And we encourage you to treat others as you would like to be treated.”
“Give the individual the power to be a producer as well as a consumer.”
“I was raised with the notion that you can do pretty much do anything you want. I always kind of just went ahead and tried things.”
“If you can get over this initial distrust that people have of strangers, you can do remarkable things.”
“We believe that business can be a tool for social good.”

8. Quotes from Travis Kalanick – Uber

“I like to say that time is a luxury.”
“Ultimately, progress and innovation win.”
“Competition is fun.”
“I prefer building rather than fundraising.”
“In a lot of ways, it’s not the money that allows you to do new things. It’s the growth and the ability to find things that people want and to use your creativity to target those.”
“Uber is efficiency with elegance on top. That’s why I buy an iPhone instead of an average cell phone, why I go to a nice restaurant and pay a little bit more. It’s for the experience.”
“Our whole goal is to drive the cost of taking an Uber BELOW the cost of owning a car.”
“We like to think of Uber as the cross between lifestyle and logistics, where lifestyle is what you want, and logistics is how you get it there.”
“The regulatory systems in place disincentivize innovation. It’s intense to fight the red tape.”

9. Quotes from Drew Houston – Dropbox

“Instead of trying to make your life perfect, give yourself the freedom to make it an adventure, and go ever upward.”
“The happiest and most successful people I know don’t just love what they do, they’re obsessed with solving an important problem, something that matters to them.”
“Learn early, learn often.”
“A lot of times it’s an asset to not know everything about everything… A lot of really great, innovative things have happened when people just didn’t know it wasn’t supposed to be possible.”
“Reading a book about management isn’t going to make you a good manager any more than a book about the guitar will make you a good guitarist, but it can get you thinking about the most important concepts.”
“The only way to learn on a zero-dollar budget is to talk to people.”
“The hardest-working people don’t work hard because they’re disciplined. They work hard because working on an exciting problem is fun.”
“If you have a dream, you can spend a lifetime studying, planning, and getting ready for it. What you should be doing is getting started.”
“Surrounding yourself with inspiring people is now just as important as being talented or working hard.”
“One misconception is that entrepreneurs love risk. Actually, we all want things to go as we expect. What you need is a blind optimism and a tolerance for uncertainty.”
“If you start your own thing, you can learn a lot really fast from doing things wrong.”

1o. Quotes from Larry Page – Google

“It’s very difficult to fail completely, if you aim high enough.”
“I think it is often easier to make progress on mega-ambitious dreams. Since no one else is crazy enough to do it, you have little competition.”
“My job as a leader is to make sure everybody in the company has great opportunities, and that they feel they’re having a meaningful impact and are contributing to the good of society.”
“I think part of the reason we’re successful so far is that originally we didn’t really want to start a business.”
“If you’re changing the world, you’re working on important things. You’re excited to get up in the morning.”
“Always deliver more than expected.”
“If we were motivated by money, we would have sold Google a long time ago and ended up on a beach.”
“We have always believed that it’s possible to make money without being evil.”
“You know what it’s like to wake up in the middle of the night with a vivid dream? And you know that if you don’t have a pencil and pad by the bed, it will be completely gone by the next morning. Sometimes it’s important to wake up and stop dreaming. When a really great dream shows up, grab it.”
“Especially in technology, we need revolutionary change, not incremental change.”
“Basically, our goal is to organize the world’s information and to make it universally accessible and useful.”
“Always work hard on something uncomfortably exciting!”
“The ultimate search engine would basically understand everything in the world, and it would always give you the right thing.”

What about you, do you know of any such inspiring quotes from other web entrepreneurs? If so, feel free to share them in the comments!

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