“It’s not about how many times you get knocked down; it’s about how many times you get back up.” – Richard Tait, co-creator of Cranium
An entrepreneur turns down McKinsey to start a tech company; now his startup has Hearst, Gannett, Time Warner Cable, and AOL as customers
It’s when you take that leave of absence or quit your job to focus on the startup full-time that it becomes real. – Roger Lee, president at PaperG
How a college grad without programming experience started a Y Combinator company and created a blog with hundreds of thousands of readers
Paul Graham was like, “This could be the Altair Basic.” – Jason Shen, Ridejoy
How this White House intern landed a job in the West Wing as Deputy Associate Director of the National Economic Council, and then founded a venture-backed company worth millions
“If you make a line from the Oval Office to people’s offices in the West Wing, and you measure that distance, there is definitely a correlation with IQ.” – Jonathan Swanson, former White House staffer
The biggest entrepreneurship lessons this science major learned in two failed attempts starting a company, before nailing it the third time with a multi-million dollar venture-backed food startup
“In a startup, there are many situations where you just don’t know what you’re supposed to do because you’ve never seen it before. But it’s also really exciting because you get experience you may never get in a traditional job.” – Kevin Yang, EAT Club
How this liberal arts major found a finance trading job by networking with female traders on Facebook, then left the industry to shoot a documentary and start a company in microfinance
“I think I felt I had to do certain things coming out of school, but quickly realized that wasn’t the life I wanted to live.” – Rachel Cook, Microlending Film Project
How this former investor has applied investing insights to running a retail business (and what he’s also learned about how much harder it is than he thought as an investor)
“This is the most creative job I’ve had since graduating college, and it’s definitely where my energy comes from.” – Vijay Brihmadesam, co-founder of Tava Indian Kitchen
What an engineer, Stanford MBA, and pro photographer (who did a photo shoot with Barack Obama) has learned about careers and relationships (oh, he also founded a VC-backed social gifting startup)
“We’re building a social gifting framework that allows me to get a gift for you by crowdsourcing the creativity of our common friends.” – Dana Underwood, The Muse Factory
Why this Harvard lawyer left the Boston Consulting Group to start an online language learning company
“We help people learn Chinese through video content, like music videos, commercials, news, and inspiring talks.” – Alan Park, founder of FluentFlix
How this entrepreneur started out selling on eBay, founded a Mashable-rated career site, and raised $1M to start a merchant loyalty company
“Investors want to rush in and invest when you position their fear and greed together: their greed to make a billion dollars and their fear of losing the deal.” – Yu-Kai Chou, RewardMe
