I never get the accountants in before I start up a business. It’s done on gut feeling, especially if I can see that they are taking the mickey out of the consumer.

A thing is worth what it can do for you, not what you choose to pay for it.

From my very first day as an entrepreneur, I’ve felt the only mission worth pursuing in business is to make people’s lives better.

So I’ve seen life as one long learning process. And if I see – you know, if I fly on somebody else’s airline and find the experience is not a pleasant one, which it wasn’t in – 21 years ago, then I’d think, well, you know, maybe I can create the kind of airline that I’d like to fly on.

Building a mission and building a business go hand in hand. The primary thing that excites me is the mission. But we have always had a healthy understanding that we need to do both.

To turn really interesting ideas and fledgling technologies into a company that can continue to innovate for years, it requires a lot of disciplines.

I would hear stories about Steve Jobs and feel like he was at 100 percent exactly what he wanted to do, but I’m sure even a Steve Jobs has compromised. Even a Rick Owens has compromised. You know, even a Kanye West has compromised. Sometimes you don’t even know when you’re being compromised till after the fact, and that’s what you regret.

If you don’t drive your business, you will be driven out of business.

My task over the last two years hasn’t just been to stop the bleeding. My task has also been to try to figure out how do we address some of the structural problems in the economy that have prevented more Googles from being created.

It’s rare for a startup to make money immediately, so you need to make sure that you have enough saved or that you have another income stream that can support you.

Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.

A hustler has to deal with danger and risk. It’s part of the game. You cannot control it all, nor would you want to. Chaos, unknown factors are not something to be anxious about.

A true capitalist doesn’t have a job, because other people and other people’s money work for them.

I base a lot of decisions on my gut, and going with an independent label was a good one.

I don’t invest in ideas because ideas are a dime a dozen. I could steal the idea pretty quickly.

With Virgin, I’ve just loved creating things. And as a private company, I can get away with moving Virgin from records to airlines to train companies to space companies to whatever, without ever having to worry about analysts knocking the value of my stock.

The greatest story of all is Colonel Sanders. He didn’t start until he was sixty-six on a freeway bypass for his chicken shop. Anything is possible!

I just figured out that if I gave my all into this game – if I put everything into the fight business – then I would eventually run the fight business.

Why are we, as a nation so obsessed with foreign things? Is it a legacy of our colonial years? We want foreign television sets. We want foreign shirts. We want foreign technology. Why this obsession with everything imported?

I always wanted to have a headphone line but I feel like I’m going to do more than just headphones eventually, but we want to wake the world up right now with this.

When Paul Allen and I started Microsoft over 30 years ago, we had big dreams about software. We had dreams about the impact it could have.

I had so many people try to talk me out of starting a rocket company, it was crazy.

After launching the first version of Facebook for a few thousand users, we would discuss how this should be built for the world. It wasn’t even a thought that maybe it could be us. We always thought it would be someone else doing it.

By reading, you learn through others‘ experiences, generally, a better way to do business, especially in our line of work where the consequences of incompetence are so final for young men.

Silicon Valley has some of the smartest engineers and technology business people in the world.

I feel that the best companies are started not because the founder wanted a company but because the founder wanted to change the world… If you decide you want to found a company, you maybe start to develop your first idea. And hire lots of workers.

We moved into the back, made it into a little 50s sitting room and started to sell the records. We had an immediate success. For one thing, these Teddy Boys were thrilled to buy the records.

While still working for others, your goal at some point must be to carve out little areas that you can operate on your own, cultivating entrepreneurial skills.

To keep the business going, you gotta keep it boomin‘.

Tourism provides employment to the poorest of the poor. Gram seller earns something, auto-rickshaw driver earns something, pakoda seller earns something, and tea seller also earns something.

The vision is to figure out how there can really be dynamic entrepreneurialism in space.

I think that every artist – or anybody that’s in business – could benefit from a direct-to-consumer strategy, so I think that that applies to us as artists and content creators, too.

We get paid for bringing value to the market place.

I’m really interested in smells. I think I’d like to own a perfumery someday.

In business, success often depends upon the relative age of your ideas.

The only real valuable thing is intuition.

The problem with car dealerships is you’ve already decided what you want to buy before you even go there, and you’re really just going there to talk through some annoying negotiation.

I don’t believe that the public knows what it wants; this is the conclusion that I have drawn from my career.

When times are bad is when the real entrepreneurs emerge.

Starting a business is not for everyone. Starting a business – I’d say, number one is have a high pain threshold.

Warren Buffet told me once and he said always follow your gut. When you have that gut feeling, you have to go with don’t go back on it.

The art of delegation is one of the key skills any entrepreneur must master.

Are we a nation that educates the world’s best and brightest in our universities, only to send them home to create businesses in countries that compete against us? Or are we a nation that encourages them to stay and create jobs, businesses, and industries right here in America?

It feels good being a restaurant owner because it’s part of my dreams of being the biggest mogul.

I’m in this business to be creative – I’ll even diminish it and say to be a content provider.

The odds of me coming into the rocket business, not knowing anything about rockets, not having ever built anything, I mean, I would have to be insane if I thought the odds were in my favor.

I’m an entrepreneur. I’m a young mogul. I’m blessed.

Good entrepreneurs are community builders, actively involved with their communities and dedicated to the community’s well being. If you’re dedicated to your community, it will be dedicated to you.

When I started Virgin from a basement in west London, there was no great plan or strategy. I didn’t set out to build a business empire… For me, building a business is all about doing something to be proud of, bringing talented people together and creating something that’s going to make a real difference to other people’s lives.

Be willing to use yourself to get out there and put the company on the market. If you have to make a fool of yourself, make a fool of yourself, but make sure that you end up on the front pages, not the back pages. In time, it’s possible that your company will stand out from the crowd, and you’ll be successful.

It’s hard to tell with these Internet startups if they’re really interested in building companies or if they’re just interested in the money. I can tell you, though: If they don’t really want to build a company, they won’t luck into it. That’s because it’s so hard that if you don’t have a passion, you’ll give up.

If advertisers spent the same amount of money on improving their products as they do on advertising then they wouldn’t have to advertise them.

I don’t think it’s a good idea to plan to sell a company.

The first time I stepped on an NBA court I became a businessman.

What changed our lives forever was when Malcolm had the idea to sell rock ‚n roll records to trendy customers.

Well, I think that there’s a very thin dividing line between success and failure. And I think if you start a business without financial backing, you’re likely to go the wrong side of that dividing line.

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.

I got an album concept called ‚Exit Strategy,‘ that might be one of my last ones. It’s a term they use in business when you build companies. You create an exit strategy as you make a company. You don’t wait till you’re five years in it; you create a exit strategy as you make the company.

I’ve never gone wrong trusting my gut.

I always invest my own money in the companies that I create. I don’t believe in the whole thing of just using other people’s money. I don’t think that’s right. I’m not going to ask other people to invest in something if I’m not prepared to do so myself.

I believe that we should own the fruits of our labor and the assets of our creations.