Jerry Yang Quotes

Silicon Valley is a mindset, not a location.

When I came to the United States in 2004 to attend university at Stanford, I was instantly inspired by the stories and advice from startup leaders in Silicon Valley and beyond, who had endeavoured to create new opportunities and improve lives around the world.

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

What makes Silicon Valley really work? It's a unique combination of great educational institutions - especially at Stanford - that generate engineers and a culture that starts companies.

The point of Silicon Valley, at least when I moved here, was we're all trying to do stuff, and none of us quite felt like we fit in anywhere else. But we were all trying to do good things. And the money was just the byproduct of good things.

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

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.

I often have said to people that there are really two cities in the country where the outlook is always forward-looking - there is never really a backward-looking tendency. My banking work has taken me out to Palo Alto, what is commonly called Silicon Valley. And you sense out there is always a forward-looking outlook. And New York City.

My friends are people who like building cool stuff. We always have this joke about people who want to just start companies without making something valuable. There's a lot of that in Silicon Valley.

One of the great things about moving to Silicon Valley is that you're surrounded by all these people who've done it before. This place is an assembly line that takes a couple of twenty-somethings and walks you through everything you need to learn.

It's almost a cliche that great Silicon Valley entrepreneurs don't go sit on a beach when they make a lot of money; they get back to work building another company or at least investing in other people's companies.

I think that's exactly what Silicon Valley was all about in those days. Let's do a startup in our parents' garage and try to create a business.

I didn't even know that there was a startup culture, that there were events with people who built businesses. When I started meeting those people and going in to that world, I felt like I was among my people for the first time in my life.

We try and reflect that there's a lot of optimism, there's a lot of positive things that are happening in 'Silicon Valley'.

To spend time in Silicon Valley in a year of political upheaval is, on one level, soothing. It is pleasant to hear talk of wearables, walled gardens, and disruptive beverages in between updates about mass deportation.

We are calling ourselves a startup nation, but the number of people who set out on their own is very low; even 10,000 a year would be low in a country like India. We can say we are a startup nation but the world won't say it.

'Silicon Valley' likes being satirized. They've all been waiting for someone to come along and make fun of it.

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

There's a reason why Silicon Valley is the worldwide innovation center, or why this is the startup valley, because I truly believe startup companies like mine are pushing the economy forward.

When you look around Silicon Valley at new companies, there are very few ideas that are going to make a dent in the universe.

At the end of the day, if you want to create more IP and more invention, you need to connect between research and entrepreneurs. People who are going to take a risk.

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.

Outsiders think of Silicon Valley as a success story, but in truth, it is a graveyard. Failure.. is Silicon Valley's greatest strength. Every failed product or enterprise is a lesson stored in the collective memory of the country. We not only don't stigmatize failure, sometime we even admire it. Venture Capitalists actually like to see a little failure in the resumes of entrepreneurs.

I think that even knocking on the door allows you to understand a little bit of that kind of stuff. Mainly what Silicon Valley has taught me, in that respect, is the business side of it, with that gold rush element as opposed to creating software.

True entrepreneurshi p comes only from risk-taking.