Founding Story Quotes

Whenever I talk to people who founded a company, I often like to ask the prehistory questions 'When did you meet? How long have you been working before you started the company?' A bad answer is, 'We met at a networking event a week ago, and we started a company because we both want to be entrepreneurs.'

I just think people have a lot of fiction. But, you know, I mean, the real story of Facebook is just that we've worked so hard for all this time. I mean, the real story is actually probably pretty boring, right? I mean, we just sat at our computers for six years and coded.

You know, I'm behind my company. My company has been a big part of my life. And it's not that I been buying a company or that my father bought a company and tried to do something out of it. You know, it's not the same thing. It's my name, it's my company, it's my signature.

I was one of the artistic directors of the Steppenwolf Theatre, which me and many dear buddies started all the way back in 1974, and I have a lot of that in my makeup.

The reality is that I spent years in the factories in Italy when I first set up Jimmy Choo. Today, everyone who has a job at Jimmy Choo, I've done their job - right down to the cleaner.

In high school, I started my first company, called M Cubed Software. We named it that because it was me and two other guys named Mike.

Even though Traf-O-Data wasn't a roaring success, it was seminal in preparing us to make Microsoft's first product a couple of years later.

The original goal for Papa John's was to make $50 grand a year and have $50 grand in the bank so I could get a date.

We started Good Neighbor in like 2006? Right around the time that Kyle graduated college. And I was doing freelance editing.

Along the way, I learned the key to launching a company. It's all about storytelling.

I think Teach for America has suffered from the fact that I did not teach, in a major way. I also think if I had taught, I wouldn't have started Teach for America.

Facebook was founded on February 4th, 2004, and around February 5th, we were feeling pretty confident it would be bigger. We would see Facebook on every single laptop in class. We knew there was a bigger story here.

My time at Yahoo, from its founding to the present, has encompassed some of the most exciting and rewarding experiences of my life.