Richard Thaler Quotes

When you innovate, you've got to be prepared for everyone telling you you're nuts.

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

To innovate is not to reform.

My view is there's no bad time to innovate.

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.

Innovation never comes from the established institutions.

The best entrepreneurs know when to ignore sage advice.

To design something really new and innovative you have to reject reason.

To create an organization that's adaptable and innovative, people need the freedom to challenge precedent, to 'waste' time, to go outside of channels, to experiment, to take risks and to follow their passions.

When we started Skype, if you look at analyst reports, no one forecasted it as a big business. Also when Google started, it was not fashionable to be in search. It's not trying to do the obvious - that's the hard part.

There's no room for being a visionary in the studio system. It literally cannot exist.

Big companies have trouble with innovation. Innovation is about bad ideas, or ideas that look like bad ideas. That's the fundamental thing.

If the idea is really new and unique and big, other people will all think it is bad and is going to fail.

I think we shouldn't buckle up our creativity. You've got to experiment!

One of the greatest things that Apple and Jobs were very good at doing was daring to do the very different thing. It's what I did with my cookbook, frankly.

In life, a lot of great ideas sound insane or absurd at first.

Entrepreneurs almost always have to step out of existing institutions that embody old ways of doing things to build their vision.

If you're not failing every now and again, it's a sign you're not doing anything very innovative.

Answers are not enough, students should be encouraged to ask questions and explore alternatives to the norm. Entrepreneurship and invention are the backbone of the new economy, yet I doubt they get more than a nod in economics courses.

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.

If I had known how hard it would be to do something new, particularly in the payments industry, I would never have started PayPal. That's why nobody with long experience in banking had done it. You needed to be naive enough to think that new things could be done.

Since I was in my early twenties, at ABC, I was always only interested in things that were not already being done.

What I often do is just think of a completely obtuse thing to do, almost the wrong thing to do. That often works because you start a different approach, something no one has tried.

Silicon Valley is a mindset, not a location.

The common question that gets asked in business is, 'why?' That's a good question, but an equally valid question is, 'why not?'