Whitney Tilson Quotes

Starting a company is rough. It's even harder when you're young - I know this firsthand, because my first company flopped when I was 25.

Every large brand has franchisees and stores that don't make it. It's unfortunate, and Cold Stone did everything it could to support its franchisees, but some failure rate is part of the business.

Almost nothing can make you more miserable than when your company is struggling, and only then do you realize that this is exactly when it's almost impossible for a CEO to quit.

I think everybody at IBM knows the early 1990s disaster, and it's in our fabric that you cannot miss the ship.

When I came to DreamWorks, I was in bad trouble. They were in bad trouble. They were millions of dollars in the hole and a few days from closing their doors. I was on my last leg.

People were expecting Rouge to go bankrupt, so there was a lot of anxiety. The corporate culture problem was even worse than in Russia. And at the same time, the work rules were more difficult.

We would be billionaires, but we took responsibility for Summa's failure.

But indeed a market like California is not good for Enron.

There was a study done in the early 20th century of all the entrepreneurs who entered the automobile industry around the same time as Henry Ford; there were something like 500 automotive companies that got funded, had the internal combustion engine, had the technology, and had the vision. Sixty percent of them folded within a couple of years.

I had knockback after knockback before I got anywhere. After I got my first record deal I thought that was it, then Gut Records went into liquidation. I was 20. I had no idea what that meant. I had a few days to get myself out of that contract or my work would be owned by someone else.

I love criticism. Equitable Life went down because management wouldn't brook criticism, but if you are in business, you have to hear what's going wrong.

Six months after we started, in 1964, there was a day when we sold only seven sandwiches. If we'd taken all the money from the register, we couldn't have paid an employee, much less the food or the rent or all that. It could have been a turning point. We could have given up.

There are lots of businesses that are well in excess of $9 billion that have gone into bankruptcy, that have been mismanaged. And that has not served anyone very well.

The weakness in the company is if we fail to execute.

There's one thing I've learned about entrepreneurs' business plans. Every one is wrong.

The truth is that most small businesses will not succeed and you need to be emotionally prepared for this.

Every time you start a company - and I've started five or six - you have the opportunity to screw up in whole new ways.

Those in leadership positions who fail to grasp or use the power of stories risk failure for their companies and for themselves.

In technology, most things fail. Most companies fail.

Every successful businessman will have experienced set-backs and failures - they're lying if they say they haven't. Virgin has had some tremendously successful businesses and some that have not quite worked out. Virgin Cola springs to mind - the product wasn't distinct enough from Coca-Cola.

Objectively speaking, Traf-O-Data was a failure as a company. Right as our business started to pick up, states began to provide their own traffic-counting services to local governments for free.

Whenever you start a new business, the sheer number of variables at hand makes failure a constant possibility.

When you get into investing, your default stance should be 'No,' because most deals suck. Most deals won't make money. Most companies will fail.

I've certainly learnt there's nothing more important than cash - cash flow issues are one of the biggest causes of company failures.

Small businesses are a risky proposition, and most celebrities want a home run.