Top 200 Startup Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Remember to celebrate milestones as you prepare for the road ahead.”

— Nelson Mandela

52. “I don’t focus on what I’m up against. I focus on my goals and I try to ignore the rest.”

— Venus Williams

53. “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”

— Mark Twain

54. “You jump off a cliff and you assemble an airplane on the way down.”

— Reid Hoffman

55. “Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me. Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful, that’s what matters to me.”

— Steve Jobs

56. “You can be comfortable in your career or extraordinary. Which one are you going to be?”

— Sally Hogshead

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

— Mark Zuckerberg

58. “The very first company I started failed with a great bang. The second one failed a little bit less, but still failed. The third one, you know, proper failed, but it was kind of okay. I recovered quickly. Number four almost didn’t fail. It still didn’t really feel great, but it did okay. Number five was PayPal.”

— Max Levchin

59. “Our industry does not respect tradition. It only respects innovation.”

— Satya Nadella

60. “If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.”

— Reid Hoffman

61. “Life is not always a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well.”

— Jack London

62. “Micromanage the process, not the people.”

— Joe Apfelbaum

63. “The world is not changed by people who sort of care.”

— Sally Hogshead

64. ““Make something people want” includes making a company that people want to work for.”

— Sahil Lavingia

65. “Make every detail perfect and limit the number of details to perfect.”

— Jack Dorsey

66. “There is only one boss: the customer. And he can fire everybody in the company, from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.”

— Sam Walton

67. “It’s not that we need new ideas, but we need to stop having old ideas.”

— Edwin H. Land

68. “The last 10% it takes to launch something takes as much energy as the first 90%.”

— Rob Kalin

69. “Don’t start a company unless it’s an obsession and something you love. If you have an exit strategy, it’s not an obsession.”

— Mark Cuban

70. “I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.”

— Steve Jobs

71. “Running a startup is like being punched in the face repeatedly, but working for a large company is like being waterboarded.”

— Paul Graham

72. “We are really competing against ourselves, we have no control over how other people perform.”

— Pete Cashmore

73. “Eliminate all the unimportant opportunities.”

— Mike Markkula

74. “No business plan survives first contact with customers.”

— Steve Blank

75. “Every worthwhile accomplishment, big or little, has its stages of drudgery and triumph: a beginning, a struggle and a victory.”

— Mahatma Gandhi

76. “Embrace what you don’t know, especially in the beginning, because what you don’t know can become your greatest asset. It ensures that you will absolutely be doing things different from everybody else.”

— Sara Blakely

77. “We often miss opportunity because it’s dressed in overalls and looks like work.”

— Thomas A. Edison

78. “Ideas are commodity. Execution of them is not.”

— Michael Dell

79. “If your sole focus is money, you may create a successful startup. But if it’s impact, you can probably create history.”

— Sharad Vivek Sagar

80. “Real artists ship.”

— Steve Jobs

81. “80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.”

— Pareto principle

82. “Sweat equity is the most valuable equity there is.”

— Mark Cuban

83. “Starting your own business is like riding a roller coaster. There are highs and lows and every turn you take is another twist. The lows are really low, but the highs can be really high. You have to be strong, keep your stomach tight, and ride along with the roller coaster that you started.”

— Lindsay Manseau

84. “Unless you are a fortune-teller, long-term business planning is a fantasy.”

— Jason Fried

85. “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”

— Parkinson's law

86. “The cost of hiring someone bad is so much greater than missing out on someone good.”

— Joe Kraus

87. “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”

— Wayne Gretzy

88. “I think the single most reassuring thing about doing a startup is knowing in advance how difficult it is going to be.”

— Jared Tame

89. “The most important thing is not to let fundraising get you down. Startups live or die on morale. If you let the difficulty of raising money destroy your morale, it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

— Paul Graham

90. “Entrepreneurs are willing to work 80 hours a week, to avoid working 40 hours a week.”

— Lori Greiner

91. “Having a great startup pitch has more to do with setting up and running a great company than optimizing some type of sales process to investors. Great investors can see through most tactics that you will use in the pitch process, so the best fundraising strategy is to build a great company.”

— Ken Howery

92. “If your dreams do not scare you, they are not big enough.”

— Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

93. “A year from now you may wish you had started today.”

— Karen Lamb

94. “I can accept failure, everyone fails at something. But I can't accept not trying.”

— Michael Jordan

95. “Believe in your dreams and dream big. And then after you’ve done that, dream bigger.”

— Howard Schultz

96. “Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.”

— Henry David Thoreau

97. “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”

— Bill Gates

98. “Opportunities are usually disguised as hard work, so most people don’t recognize them.”

— Ann Landers

99. “Even if you are on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.”

— Will Rogers

100. “Every day I get up and look through the Forbes list of the richest people in America. If I’m not there, I go to work.”

— Robert Orben