As you may have seen, we have compiled an infographic of the top 20 startups of all time. Revenue numbers are awesome, but what got them there? What sort of ideologies and ideas did it take to escalate these 20 people into this pantheon of awesome entrepreneurial talent? What can we learn from that to apply to our businesses? To answer these questions, we sat down and compiled our favorite quote from each entrepreneur on our list. This list of quotes on business, entrepreneurship, and startups contains wisdom from managing your time to managing your people. Here are our top 20 entrepreneurial quotes of all time.

Steve Jobs, Apple

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.”

Larry Page, Google

“Many leaders of big organizations, I think, don’t believe that change is possible. But if you look at history, things do change, and if your business is static, you’re likely to have issues.”

Bill Gates, Microsoft

“The most meaningful way to differentiate your company from your competitors, the best way to put distance between you and the crowd is to do an outstanding job with information. How you gather, manage and use information will determine whether you win or lose.”

Jeff Bezos, Amazon

“I strongly believe that missionaries make better products. They care more. For a missionary, it’s not just about the business. There has to be a business, and the business has to make sense, but that’s not why you do it. You do it because you have something meaningful that motivates you.”

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook

“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.”

Ma Huateng, Tencent

“The leader of the market today may not necessarily be the leader tomorrow.”

Jerry Yang, Yahoo!

“If you find something that feels right but doesn’t seem to fit into your master plan, take a chance and commit to it by working hard. You shouldn’t be afraid to let passion get behind the wheel. You might really love where you end up.”

Robin Li, Baidu

“People can get information – on entertainment, politics, finance – much easier than before. That will change the way people do business, the way people live.”

Bill Hewlett, Hewlett-Packard

“The greatest success goes to the person who is not afraid to fail in front of even the largest audience.”

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn

“People who take risk intelligently can usually actually make a lot more progress than people who don’t.”

Jack Dorsey, Twitter

“Make every detail perfect and limit the number of details to perfect.”

Drew Houston, Dropbox

“We’ve had customers from the beginning. The reason people use Dropbox is because they really love it. We think more about who is going to be competing with what we are going to be doing, not with where we started.”

Andrew Mason, Groupon

“I’ve been very lucky, from the beginning. I’ve found that as long as you’re fundamentally good – as long as you’re not being bad to people – people give you a lot of room to be yourself, because being yourself is being honest. And that’s what people want to see.”

Craig Newmark, Craigslist

“In business, there are times when you disagree, and sometimes it turns out that you’re just plain wrong. Humor takes away tension and helps you realize you’re wrong.”

Alex Karp, Palantir

“Any business would IPO at our size, but that would make running a business like ours very difficult.”

Reed Hastings, Neflix

“But as an entrepreneur you have to feel like you can jump out of an aeroplane because you’re confident that you’ll catch a bird flying by. It’s an act of stupidity, and most entrepreneurs go splat because the bird doesn’t come by, but a few times it does.”

Jim McKelvey, Square

“People who solve problems are happier.”

Mark Pincus, Zynga

“From the beginning… I wanted to build a company that could sustain not for two years or four years or even ten years but be something that really matters over time the way Amazon and Google and others have.”

Peter Vesterbacka, Rovio

“You have to have more leadership, less management. It’s about getting stuff done, you can sit around and analyze things forever but while you do that the competition has moved on.”
These are our favorite quotes from our top 20 entrepreneurs. Did we miss any?

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