James Altucher Quotes

Most entrepreneurs are merely technicians with an entrepreneurial seizure. Most entrepreneurs fail because you are working IN your business rather than ON your business.

About 10 million people start a business each year, and about one out of two will make it. The average entrepreneur is often on his or her third startup.

Personal relationships are always the key to good business. You can buy networking; you can't buy friendships.

Prove to yourself that your business, in micro-scale at least, creates value. If you believe it, you'll find it that much easier to convince potential investors, partners and employees, too.

If you don't drive your business, you will be driven out of business.

You just can't get too focused on worrying about what's going to happen in the next quarter. You have to worry about where the business is headed long-term.

For over forty years, I've been one of the most passionate believers in entrepreneurs. From day one, I've learned that too many small businesses are predicated on business models that the owner barely understands, and then, those same men and women are baffled when their business dreams are overwhelmed with struggles they never foresaw.

If you don't have a VP Finance on your team reporting to you, do yourself, your team, and your investors a favor and go hire one right now.

So many of the major decisions that affect the entire future of your enterprise happen during its first year in business. In fact, most don't make it because they don't know how to get the resources they need to survive.

Like any small business owner, I experienced the pressures of building a company from the ground up - developing a business plan, balancing the books, meeting payroll and building a customer base.

We have co-opted seed funds. You know, Y Combinator, that was completely our money. We have secret handshakes with a whole bunch of people. Very dangerous, because word gets out that so-and-so's money is Sequoia's money, that would not be a good thing.

Banking gives you a glimpse into what makes companies succeed and what makes companies fail.

Well, as we built the business in the 1990's, as I said, I enjoyed that.

Filmmaking is a business and at the bottom line people who don't make fiscally responsible decisions end up going into another line of work.

American capitalists, enthralled by the doctrines of finance, have put their income statements in service of the balance sheet.

My father was an entrepreneur - a sign maker, and he had about 20 employees - and often he'd take me to business meetings, and I would listen to him talk with his workers and customers. We would also talk a lot about business over dinner.

I'm so bored by business and money.

In our experience, what we have found is the rare commodity is a good management team. And good management teams manage through good and bad cycles and manage to grow their business over a long period of time.

I like doing business with people in India.

From a relatively early age I got interested in business.

Not only am I a spender, I have had a couple of business people in the past who have been spending my money quite happily.

Money is always the least of the problems. It is finding the right business or growing the right business. You can't do that without the right people.

You can't run a €10 million business the way you run a €1 million business.

I have run large organizations, I know what it takes to create a healthy business climate, and I have more experience than Jerry Brown doing that. So it'll be a stark contrast, a career politician vs. someone who has met a payroll, gotten a return on investment, knows how to use technology to do more with less.

You can make great money in a utility type of business by borrowing cheaply and lending sensibly but that's not what's being done.