Jessica Williams Quotes

I tend to not discriminate when it comes to people I can learn from. Basically, if someone has built a meaningful business in software, technology or media, faced disruption and adversity, and overcame underdog status, I want to know how they did it.

The best start-ups might be considered slightly less extreme kinds of cults. The biggest difference is that cults tend to be fanatically wrong about something important. People at a successful start-up are fanatically right about something those outside it have missed.

Once you meet an entrepreneur like Jack Ma, you just want to make sure you bet on him. It's not a hard decision.

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.

You think Bill Gates would have dropped out of Harvard and toiled away creating Microsoft if he thought the government was going to take most of the company? Or Steve Jobs - drop out of Stanford to create Apple?

Successful people are the ones who are breaking the rules.

I want to create something like Sony. Not in terms of manufacturing products but creating something that is innovative, makes money, improves peoples' lives.

Is there anyone out there who is the next Steve Jobs? I think Jeff Bezos is pretty close. He is very smart. He is extremely creative. He has completely reinvented the way in which commerce is done online.

The height of success is when you break your business, that is what I say! Just when you think things are really, really going well, that's the time to change.

Business people have been made into these rock stars because they've made a lot of money.

While my six-song EP is unlikely to set any sales records, it's one of my biggest personal achievements - on par with starting my own company. On par with selling my own company.

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

I want to be a combination of P. Diddy and Oprah.

There would really be no reason to get up in the morning if Founders Fund was not willing to invest in companies that were doing important things, great businesses that very few people believe in.

Success in Silicon Valley, most would agree, is more merit-driven than almost any other place in the world. It doesn't matter how old you are, what sex you are, what politics you support or what color you are. If your idea rocks and you can execute, you can change the world and/or get really, stinking rich.

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 'crazy' is a compliment. I think you make money with people who are crazy.

I'm not sure whether Jeff Bezos is the greatest thing in the world coming along or if he may be the emperor with no clothes.

For decades, technology entrepreneurship has been revered, and people like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk were heroes.

At the end of the day, what makes Silicon Valley work is technology and the outcome of making money. Those two things have to be healthy. It has to matter a lot more than who is the celebrity and who is famous and who goes to the best parties.

Elon Musk is an incredible leader and entrepreneur. I have known him since 1995 when he first came to Silicon Valley.

There's a reason why start-ups, especially disruptive start-ups - like Google or Amazon or Uber - are full of young people. That's because young people are not as wedded to the old fashioned ways of doing things.

All the biggest companies are based on a founder who had a need, hacked it together, and said, 'Hey, other people might want this.'

I do think there are more and more entrepreneurs all the time that think big. Those are the people we should be finding and funding. Most of them will fail, but the ones who succeed will change the world, and that is progress.

Not everybody wants to be Mark Zuckerberg, but everybody wants to create a little piece of the American dream, the Silicon Valley version. I don't think that's a bad thing.