Three Quotes from Glenn Kelman on Entrepreneurship

Three quotes by Glenn Kelman on entrepreneurship that speak to entrepreneurship as self-actualization, partnerships, and depression.

Three Quotes from Glenn Kelman on Entrepreneurship

I have quoted Glenn Kelman, the CEO of Redfin,  several times since I started this blog. He has a gift for language and is willing to be candid about his fears and shortcomings.  Here are three quotes that don’t fit neatly within twitter’s character limit without amputating too much of their impact:

“Business schools and conferences have institutionalized entrepreneurialism as an avocation like law or medicine when it is more often a streak of temperament, luck and inspiration. Far from a program taught by somebody else, entrepreneurialism has always been for me my only shot at being myself.”
Glen Kelman in “To Steve Or Not To Steve“

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“The way that Charles Dickens once described his depression–as the child inside himself who won’t stop crying–always seemed to me to be a better description of the entrepreneur’s insatiable unhappiness with a world that could be so much better.”
Glenn Kelman in “Entrepreneur 2.0”

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“Building sustainable partnerships with low-margin small businesses is hard; it probably involves some level of shared risk, with pricing based on long-term profits rather than short-term revenues.”
Glenn Kelman in “Groupon’s Success Disaster“

Related Blog Posts

• “Startups Are Hard Work and Require Planning”
  Lately I’ve been thinking how hard, not how easy, it is to build a new company. Hard has gone out of fashion. Like college students bragging about how they barely studied, start-ups today take care to project a sense of ease. Wherever I’ve worked, we’ve secretly felt just the opposite. We’re assailed by doubts, mortified by our own shortcomings, surrounded by freaks, testy over silly details.
• “Planning Will Save a Software Startup Money”
  • Oct-1-2007: Financial Models for Underachievers: Two Years of the Real Numbers of a Startup
  • Oct-14-2007 Glenn Kelman’s Financial Model
  • Generic Model derived from Kelman’s
• “Be Careful How You Tell Yourself  ‘The Story So Far’“
• “Uncertain Times”
  “Life,” William James once said, “is in the transitions.” He wasn’t talking about weddings and graduations, but the lonely moments before, when a decision still hangs in the balance, and irrelevant details are so vivid that they’ll stick in your mind for years to come: the melted-plastic smell of a U-Haul cab; the iron sound of a public mailbox swinging shut; a paper hospital cup; a flight of stairs; a metal door-knob; a sealed envelope.
• “Quotes For Entrepreneurs — October 2010”
  “A startup turns you into both the lab rat struggling desperately to survive and the lab scientist standing back and measuring his performance. It gives you less patience with the ideologues telling you what the rat should have done.”
  Glen Kelman “The Crazy Woman Speaks“

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