Priceless advice from today's most successful Entrepreneurs

I stumbled across this video today and decided to publish every single quote from it. Wether you're an entrepreneur or someone with the dream of building their own business one day, this advice from the drivers behind today's most striving businesses like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and countless others will definitely serve as a motivation.

Jeff Bezos (Amazon) - “Do something you’re really passionate about and don’t try to chase something what is kind of the hot passion of the day.”

Steve Jobs (Apple) - “You need to have a lot of passion for what you do, because it’s so hard that if you don’t love what you do and you’re doing it over a sustained period of time, any rational person would give up.”

Pierre Omidyar (eBay) - “Just go and do it, fail at some things and try to learn as much as possible. Take that learning to the next experience and don’t let people whom you may respect tell you it can’t be done, because they don’t have the courage to try it.”

Michael Dell (Dell) - “I think people that look for great ideas to make money are nearly as successful as those who really try to find something they love to do or something they know they’re good at.”

Sergey Brin (Google) - “I think it’s very rewarding when you work on something you think is gonna make a big difference and even though it’s harder I think the passion brings so much more energy with it that you’re more likely to succeed.”

Biz Stone (Twitter) - “You have to have an emotional investment in what you’re doing. Success is not guaranteed by any means, but failure is much more likely if you don’t love what you’re doing.”

Gary Vaynerchuk (Wine Library) - “If you know exactly what you want to be you need to spend as much time with people that are actually that already.”

Daniel Ek (Spotify) - “One of the things I do is I question a lot of things. Ask yourself, given everything you have today is there a way we can make this better?”

Kevin Rose (Digg) - “When we’re coming up with ideas we always ask ourselves: What kind of new market is this creating and what part of my day and what problem is it solving? I’ve gone so far as taking an entire catalogue of my day writing down every single thing I do and then asking myself: Is there something here?”

James Altucher (Stockpickr) - “I started writing down ten ideas a day since 2001, because when I don’t fill this page every single day my idea muscle will atrophy. The good news is, after about six months of doing that you’re like a machine and people get surprised at how many ideas you could just have anywhere.”

Robert Greene (Mastery) - “Understand that naturally nobody is interested in your idea and the world couldn’t care less. You have to persuade them and you have to show that you’re the one person out there that can do it.”

Guy Kawasaki (Apple) - “When it comes to changing the world one thing I learned from Steve Jobs is that you need to foster the belief in what you are dreaming so that it becomes a reality. And that’s very different than saying ‘I don’t expect anybody to believe it, until I see it’. You need t believe it before they can see it.”

Steve Wozniak (Apple) - “Build things at first for yourself, things that you would want! I don’t necessarily think you have to have the home run on your first start like the Apple Computer. I spent a long time in my life building things for myself and for fun, and fun is one of the key things because that drives you to think of how you can make it better and better than you ever would if you’re doing it for a company.”

Mark Cuban (Cyber Dust) - “I think there’s always going to be an element of luck to it, but I think it’s more important to put yourself in a business that can be ubiquitous, that doesn’t have limits. Because if it can’t be something that you can visualise every business or every customer using it’s going to be tough to scale to be big enough or have the perceived value.” 

Sam Altman (Y Combinator) - “You want an idea where you can say ‘I know it sounds like a bad idea, but here’s specifically why it’s actually a great one.’ You want to sounds crazy but actually be right.”

Tony Fadell (Nest) - “When you’re trying to differentiate, when you’re trying to do something different there’s gonna be that gut moment: Is this right or is this not right? If you’re not having doubt you’re not pushing the boundaries far enough.”

Danae Ringelmann (Indiegogo) - “Don’t think about what is the quickest way to success. That will happen if you actually build something super meaningful and super important. Think about what is the best way to building something important that the world really needs.”

Simon Sinek (Start with Why) - “This little idea explains why some organisations and some leaders are able to inspire where other aren’t: Every single person, every organisation knows what they do. Some know how they do it. But very few people actually know why they do what they do. And by why I don’t mean profit. That’s always a result. I mean: What’s your purpose? What’s your cause? What’s your belief? Why does your organisation exist?”

Seth Godin (Tribes) - “When we see a kid with a lemonade stand it’s different that when we see a vending machine selling lemonade, even if it’s exactly the same product because the story around it is what people are paying for. So when I meet entrepreneurs I ask: Why should I pick you? Why do I care about what you’re doing? And when they start giving me statistics of why they are better than their competitor Im already glazed over, because thats not part of the way I see the world.”

Evan Williams (Medium) - “I have to want this to exist in the world. I think a great check is to see if I still wanted this even if I had nothing to do with it, I was not involved or I got no money off it. Then you know if you really feel good about the idea and can be passionate about it.”

Reid Hoffmann (LinkedIn) - “I think the classic entrepreneurial impulse to hold your special idea to yourself is a mistake. Your competitive advantage is not that you have this idea locked away in your close which may or may not be accurate. Your actual competitive advantage is when you’re assembling the intelligence around ‘Does this idea work?’, ‘What is the right team?’, ‘What are the right learnings?’ and we’re essentially in motion.”

Jack Dorsey (Twitter, Square) - “The hardest thing to do is start. Everyone has an idea but it’s really about executing and building the idea and attracting other people to help you work on the idea. That’s the biggest challenge. But the way to begin is to get the idea out of your head and draw it out, talk about it, program it or build it.”

Kevin Systrom (Instagram) - “You don’t have to be the best but you have to learn just enough to be dangerous to build an idea and concept it and show it to the world and then it turns out there are lots of other people, who are much better at doing all that stuff. But you need to find people who can be drawn to the idea that you build and then they end up taking it and make any of it.”

Drew Houston (Dropbox) - “One way to conceptualise what makes a good product is maximising the probability that someone shows up at the front door of your store or your website or whatever it is and ends up with a solved problem.”

Brian Chesky (Airbnb) - “Oftentimes the best methodology to start with the perfect experience of just one person, get that right and then figure out how to scale something great instead of scaling something not so great and then trying to improve it. That’s really hard to do.”

Peter Thiel (Paypal) - “I think the you are starting a new business you don’t want to go after giant markets, you want to go after small markets and you want to take over those markets quickly.”

Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX) - “Constantly seek criticism. A well-thought-out critique of whatever you’re doing is as valuable as gold and you should seek that from everyone you can, but particularly your friends.”

Alan Schaaf (Imgur) - “You can be asking online communities what they think about your ideas or if they have any advice with what you’re working on. Not only will you hear from people who are passionate about the subject but you’ll be hearing from people all around the world each with their own experiences and stories that can help you.”

Chris Sacca (Lowercase Capital) - “There are a lot of people from whom we can learn a lot. And I think the once piece of advice is: don’t underestimate anyone you come across. The smartest leaders I’ve ever seen have always gone around the room and asked for everybody’s opinion.”

Paul Graham (Y Combinator) - “Most startups that fail do it ultimately, because they did not make something that people wanted. They made something that they thought people would want but they were either in denial about wether it was actually any good or somebody else came along and made something that people wanted even more.”

Dennis Crowley (foursquare) - “The best piece of advice that we’ve figured out is to not let other people distract you with what you’re doing. There’s always haters that say ‘Your idea is stupid’, ’This idea is never going to work’, ‘Don’t event bother doing that because someone else is going to do it before you’.To get where we are we saw things we wanted to build and we went out and built them. It turns out, when you build stuff that you like to use, there’s a good chance that there’s thousands of other people that want to use it too.”

Eric Ries (The Lean Startup) - “It’s not about doing focus groups and it’s not about double-checking your vision. It really is about integrating this concept of testing your ideas rigorously throughout the product development process out the marking  process, even as we scale up.”

Leah Busque (TaskRabbit) - “What you really need to think about is what’s the smallest possible test that I can run for this idea, concept or theory? Then get it out there and get customers using it because your customers are going to be the ones to tell you if it’s really working or not.”

Anthony Casalena (Squarespace) - “There’s almost this expectation that you have this sort of I’m gonna change the world, I’m gonna make a dent in the universe kind of ambition. But it’s actually OK early on to just solve small problems in layers until you actually get to a point where you have the capacity to do that.”

Alexis Ohanian (Reddit) - “What this all comes down to is doing something exceptional for your users, wether it’s in community, wether it’s in connection or wether it’s in design. Our big advantage as a startup is that we can actually get away with doing this and we can make this a core part of why we’re doing business.”

Jason Fried (Basecamp) - “I think you should be spending your money on teaching and sharing, and that might mean hiring a writer too instead of a marketing person. You start writing and start getting people to listen to what you’re saying. You can’t talk about yourself all the time, because no one is going to come back for that but you get to talk about things that are relevant to the industry or ideas that you have and start building that audience up.”

Palmer Luckey (Oculus Rift) - “I do think that one thing that’s important, especially if you’re a founder or a technical founder is to realise that you can’t do everything and even if you can you shouldn’t.”

Kamal Ravikant (Angellist) - “You should find a great partner no matter what it is that you’re doing and you should look for someone who is very high intelligence, very high energy and very high integrity. And you need all three of those and can’t compromise any of them. Otherwise you’ll end up with someone who is not smart or not hard working which is obviously not good or in the worst case you end up with a smart, hard-working crook who ends up working against you interests. And integrity is something that takes a lot of time spent with someone to figure out.”

Ben Silbermann (Pinterest) - “The most important thing when you’re working with people early is that you guys line up on what your goals are. You can build a small business or a huge company, but I think you really have to be aligned on that.”

Tony Hsieh (Zappos) - “A lot of corporations have core values or guiding principles but the problem with that is that they become meaningless after a while. We wanted to come up with committable core values and by committable, meaning we’re willing to fire people based on those values, completely independent of their actual job performance.”

Andrew Mason (Groupon) - “The definition of values is they are the behaviours or principles that you adhere to within your company and the degree to which you have the courage to maintain your conviction around those ideas is the degree to which you’re going to be successful over the long term.”

Richard Brandon (Virgin) - “A company is simply a group of people and as a leader of people you have to be a great listener and a great motivator. You have to be very good at praising and looking for the best in people. And people are no different from flowers: if you water flowers, they flourish and if you praise people, they flourish. I think that’s a critical attribute of a leader.”

Andrew Ljung (Soundcloud) - “So I kind of half jokingly with a lot of people say that my job is basically like to be the assistant for the rest of the company. My job is to make sure that you have what you need to kick ass and if you don’t have that I’m not doing my job.”

Justin Kan (Justin.tv) - “There are a lot of things that are outside of your control. A lot of external circumstances will determine the success of your idea, wether the market timing or the economy is right for this new kind of service or wether you meet the right people who will finance your company. Many external circumstances are outside of your control but will affect the outcome and you have to be OK with that.”

Jessica Livingston (Y Combinator) - “A quality that I think is important is kind of being flexible minded or open-minded. I’m not saying you shouldn’t have a vision for your idea or product, but you need to be open for changes.”

Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) - “So many things go wrong when you’re starting a company and often people ask what mistakes you should avoid making. My answer to that question is: don’t even bother trying to avoid mistakes, because you’re going to make tons of mistakes anyways and the important thing is actually learning quickly and not giving up. There are things in every single year of Facebook’s existence that could’ve killed us or it just seemed like moving forward and making a lot of progress seemed intractable but you just kind of bounce back and you learn and nothing is impossible. You just have to kind of keep running through the walls.”

Marc Andreessen (Andreessen Horowitz) - “The two people we really zero in on people are courage and genius. Courage, which is to say not giving up in the face of adversity and being absolutely determined to succeed is the one that people can learn. It can be very painful but you can force yourself to do it. The genius part is a little big hard to force yourself to do. Courage without genius might not get you where you need to go, but genius without courage almost certainly won’t.”

Dustin Moskovitz (Facebook) - “I think the reality is not quite so glamorous and there’s sort of an ugly side to being an entrepreneur and also just more importantly with what you’re actually spending your time on is just a lot of hard work. Basically you’re just sitting at your desk heads down focused, answering customers, customers support emails, doing sales and figuring out hard engineering problems. So it’s really important that you go in with eyes wide open.”

Tim Ferriss (The 4 Hour Work Week) - “Optimism has a place but I think even more so for the first time entrepreneur you need to be pragmatically pessimistic. What I mean by that is you need to define all the worst-cast scenarios in terms of financial loss, time loss, etc. and look what you will learn if that happens and accept and come to terms with that before you ever start. If you don’t do that and you go straight into battling the world, trying to conquer with rose-colored glasses the first time you hit a major hiccup you’re gonna become really demoralised and you will quit.”

Emmett Shear (Twitch) - “If you don’t love it you won’t make it through the long period of pain that is inevitable so make sure that you take care of yourself during the process. Make sure that you take care of your mental health, your physical health, while you’re doing it because it’s a long road.”