“Taking money from someone else kills more start-ups than anything else does. Do everything you can to avoid taking money. If you must, your best prospects are potential customers. You have something they want, so if they invest in you, it can be a win-win situation.” — Mark Cuban

via 37Signals

“We put the community first, the consumer second and businesses third.” — Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO Yelp.com

“Build something people want, scale it up, make sure it’s defensible, and make sure you can make money with it. Build a company you are proud of. If you do those things, you’ll do just fine.” — Marc Andreessen, technology entrepreneur

“To build up publicity and mindshare you have to give away value, but the same product often has a vastly different perceived value based on price point and how they got it. It is so hard to win marketshare by lowering price, but easy to win marketshare by increasing (real and perceived) value.” — Aaron Wall

Couldn’t agree more.

Well, you’ve got to go after it. [Sometimes you’ll win.] Sometimes you’ll sink. Sometimes you’ll get some good humility training. But in the end, you can smile and say, “I had a hell of a day!”
— Don McLagan, chairman, president & ceo, Compete, Inc.