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Entrepreneurs

creation or extraction of economic value

Entrepreneurship has traditionally been defined as the process of designing, launching and running a new business, which typically begins as a small business, such as a startup company, offering a product, process or service for sale or hire.

I think that people have the idea of an entrepreneur being the sort of stereotype person who treads all over everybody and bullies their way to the top. There certainly are people like that, and they have managed to get away with it, but they generally get their come-uppance in the end.
- Richard Branson
CONTENT : A - F , G - L , M - R , S - Z , See also , External links

Quotes

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Quotes are arranged alphabetically by author

A - F

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  • I think the entrepreneurial spirit is still alive and kicking. I hope it never ever dies, because I think when it does, the world dies.
    • Duncan Bannatyne, British businessman. ‘Duncan Bannatyne (Beat The Bank)’, an interview with Alex Fletcher, 10 November 2008, from Digital Spy website.
  • Entrepreneurs are artists and I mean “artists” in the true sense of the word: they see something no one else does.
    • Steve Blank,serial entrepreneur and academic, interview with Jake Cook, "Steve Blank: Lessons From 35 Years of Making Startups Fail Less", U99 website, 2013.
  • Normal people expect to be recognized for what they do. Entrepreneurs make their own recognition and create their own reality.
    • Steve Blank, interview with Harvard Business Review, [1]. 3 August 2017.
  • I think that people have the idea of an entrepreneur being the sort of stereotype person who treads all over everybody and bullies their way to the top. There certainly are people like that, and they have managed to get away with it, but they generally get their come-uppance in the end.
  • To any potential entrepreneur I would say, don't go with the wave; find something unique.
    • James Caan, Dragons' Den: Success from Pitch to Profit (2007), Part 2: Inside the Den, p 203.
  • I don’t believe there are any free lunches. There is no easy ride to success. The journey is what it is and you have to accept that if you want to be a successful entrepreneur.
    • James Caan, Interview for Director Magazine, May 2008.
  • The true entrepreneur is one who thinks laterally, about how to make a second business out of the first.
    • Evan Davis (British economist, journalist and presenter), Dragons’ Den: Success from Pitch to Profit (2007), Part 3: Know the Business, p. 245.

G - L

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  • I see an entrepreneur as the chief designer of a business that works better than any other.
    • Michael E. Gerber (b.1936), American small business guru and author, ‘A Conversation with Michael Gerber’, from an interview posted on Businessweek.com website, 24 March 2008.
  • [T]he entrepreneur is the focal point at which the dynamic forces... materialize into action for economic progress. The entrepreneur doesn't really respond primarily to the profit motive... entrepreneur and investor—are often not... the same person. Neither does the entrepreneur seek power... management and entrepreneur are not necessarily one. Nor do Veblenesque social status or Weberian Protestant righteousness seem to be the main motives... Rather, he seems to be the adventurer, a pioneer, an artist sculpting in economic clay. ...Is the dynamic force that sustains the industrialized economic system... an irrational spirit..? Many economists... postulate the existence of an "economic man," who rationally and objectively computes... and makes a decision that will maximize perofits. ...[T]his imaginary construct is the dynamic implicitly assumed for almost all of the economic theories from the late 1800s to the present. ...[T]hey continue to use it because without economic man most of their theories would be invalidated.
    • Martin Gerhard Giesbrecht, The Evolution of Economic Society: An Introduction to Economics (1972) Ch. 7, The Arrival of Modern Economies and Economics, pp. 190-191.
  • For too long, enterprise has been defined in quite narrow terms—a vague notion of business start-ups. This definition has confined the study of the subject to the fringes—a kind of strange novelty, or a bolt-on to other subjects.
    • Peter Jones (b.1966), British businessman. ‘Entrepreneurs are not born, they are taught’, The Guardian (UK) newspaper, 6 October 2009.
  • The entrepreneur is the person who seeks to identify what consumers, at home or abroad or both, want and would be willing to buy at a profitable price. These entrepreneurs are the job-creators because it is they who gather the men and women, the material, the machinery, and the money to turn the vision of a market into a reality.
    • Keith Joseph, Baron Joseph in 1986 introduction to Self-Help, Samuel Smiles originally published in 1859.
  • If you look at the typical profile of entrepreneurs, they have changed a lot. The startup companies today have pretty much been the people who survived in a very tough, Darwinian environment. It’s really a one-in-a-million thing.
    • Kai-Fu Lee, Chinese-American businessman, computing science researcher. ‘Google China’s Kai-Fu Lee Debuts Innovation Works’, interviewed by Rob Hof, posted on 6 September 2009, on BusinessWeek.com website.
  • Brilliant minds are applying technology to world's toughest problems.
    • John Kerry, U.S. Secretary of State, at Stanford University "Hacking for Diplomacy: Tackling Foreign Policy Challenges with the Lean Launchpad," 14 October 2016, [3].

M - R

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  • Napoleon said Britain is a nation of shopkeepers and a shopkeeper is an entrepreneur—he or she is a small business person. That’s exactly what we are.
    • Theo Paphitis, Greek Cypriot born British entrepreneur. ‘Theo Pathitis: Business Adventurer’, an interview on The Open University’s website, open2.net, published on 23 December 2009.

S - Z

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  • We have seen that the function of entrepreneurs is to reform or revolutionize the pattern of production by exploiting an invention or, more generally, an untried technological possibility for producing a new commodity or producing an old one in a new way, by opening up a new source of supply of materials or a new outlet for products, by reorganizing an industry and so on. ...To undertake such new things is difficult and constitutes a distinct economic function, first, because they lie outside the routine tasks... and secondly, because the environment resists in many ways... from simple refusal either to finance or to buy a new thing, to physical attack on the man who tries to produce it. To act with confidence beyond the range of familiar beacons and to overcome that resistance requires aptitudes that are present in only a small fraction of the population and that define the entrepreneurial type as well as the entrepreneurial function. This function does not essentially consist in either inventing anything or otherwise creating the conditions which the enterprise exploits. It consists of getting things done.
    • Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942, 1950) Part II: Can Capitalism Survive? Ch. XII, Crumbling Walls, I. The Obscolescence of the Entrepreneurial Function, p. 132.
  • In this world people remember you for the things you do for others rather than for yourself.
    • Rehman Siddiq, Pakistani Entrepreneur. Interview for UNICEF Voices of Youth, October 2013.
  • An entrepreneur is very enthusiastic and dances to a different drum beat, but never considers success as something which equates to personal wealth.
    • Dame Anita Roddick (1942–2007), British businesswoman. From her interview with Martyn Lewis, as recorded in his book, Reflections on Success (1997).
  • We [entrepreneurs] have incredible enthusiasm, and I think part of the success of any entrepreneur is energy. Entrepreneurs have this real belief that their lives are about service and leadership.
    • Anita Roddick. From her interview with Martyn Lewis, as recorded in his book, Reflections on Success (1997).

See also

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