Nolan Bushnell Quotes

Steve Jobs has been right twice. The first time we got Apple. The second time we got NeXT. The Macintosh ruled. NeXT tanked. Still, Jobs was right both times.

Startups were thriving in Los Angeles when Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard were closer to the nursery than they were the garage.

Silicon Valley is a mindset, not a location.

Jeremy Stoppelman started Yelp. Max Levchin started Slide. I started LinkedIn. It was a mininova explosion of folks jumping out to doing other entrepreneurial activities.

You can make something big when young that will carry you through life. Look at all the big startups like Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. They were all started by very young people who stumbled on something of unseen value. You'll know it when you hit a home run.

Silicon Valley's long-running track record of creating globally disruptive startups is the envy of the world.

Entrepreneurs don't believe the future is predictable - but they do believe that they can create the future themselves.

In Silicon Valley, if you spend a lot of time thinking about the obstacles, you'll talk yourself out of everything, because the more you look at it, the less logical something sounds, since no one has done it yet.

When Facebook famously moved out to Palo Alto, there were people in the same house Facebook was based in working on different ideas. It is vital to remember that.

For a first-time entrepreneur, there's nothing better than being in Silicon Valley because there is so much going on, and there's such a large number of inventors, that even a B level idea or a C level idea could be nurtured and be given venture capital there.

Part of the challenge of being an entrepreneur, if you're going for a really huge opportunity, is trying to find problems that aren't quite on the radar yet and try to solve those.

Mostly what I'm focused on is finding people who are younger who haven't built companies before but have a good idea.

Most entrepreneurial ideas will sound crazy, stupid and uneconomic, and then they'll turn out to be right.

Some people are serial entrepreneurs and want to just move on to the next thing. They just want to clean the slate and start from scratch. I feel that sometimes, too, and the way that we do that here is we build things inside Shutterstock: we launch new products all the time.

There's a new generation of entrepreneurs in the Valley who have arrived since 2000, after the dotcom bust. They're completely fearless.

The bad thing about young people starting a company is that sometimes they do it for the wrong reasons or because they have the wrong skill set, but the good thing is that they don't have any of the old paradigms baked into them, so they have a lot of the bright new ideas that are harder to come by as you get older.

I think entrepreneurs are born and not created, and so I think you see a lot of similarities among entrepreneurs in different parts of the world. Their backdrop may be very different, but their drive to create a business and to create jobs remains very much the same, whether it's in Silicon Valley or Kandahar or Kabul.

New startups embody the creativity, the innovation of young people, and for me, it was and is a very worthwhile experience to interact with them.

This paradox of vision - the genius of youthful ignorance - is nothing new. Had Bill Gates not been in diapers in the early days of computer software, he might have understood that there could never be a market for consumer software - but the 19-year-old Gates went ahead and cofounded Microsoft.

Elon Musk is an incredibly prolific entrepreneur, having come up with, or been at the founding team of Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity, PayPal, all different industries that seem to have nothing to do with each other.

It suddenly occurred to me that the hottest tech startups are solving all the problems of being 20 years old, with cash on hand, because that's who thinks them up.

Rob Kalin, Etsy's founder, never finished college. Evan Williams, Biz Stone, Jack Dorsey - the founders of Twitter - are not college graduates. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder, is another dropout. And, of course, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.

A lot of the entrepreneurs and founders have big dreams and are on a mission to build things that the world has never seen before.

Founders are exceptional, and they all want to go back to creating. And I feel privileged to be able to do that.

Over the last ten years, technological advances have dramatically lowered the financial bar for starting a new company, but the courage bar for building a great company remains as high as it has ever been.