Elizabeth Holmes quotes: in 2015, Forbes named Holmes the youngest self-made female billionaire in the world because of a $9 billion dollar valuation for Theranos – her startup that would supposedly revolutionize blood tests. Then she was accused of fraud. Whoops-a-daisy. From billionaire to bankrupt, just like that. Nonetheless, surely, there’s somethin’ you and I can learn from her, no?
“I would say three things: find what you love, and don’t let it go no matter what. I would say Winston Churchill really knew what he was talking about when he said, ‘Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never…’ And I would say that I am living proof that it’s true that if you can imagine it, you can achieve it.”
“I think people can benefit tremendously from really asking why they’re doing certain things.”
“You’ll get knocked down over and over and over again, and you get back up.”
“When people say, ‘I want to start a business,’ my question is always, ‘Why?’ Because there’s got to be a mission – there’s got to be a reason you’re doing it so that no matter how hard it is, you want to keep doing it over and over and over again, because you love it.”
“And if you know what it is you’re trying to do, then it’s a question of being very, very open to failure. We will fail over a thousand times till we get this thing to work, but we will get it on the 1,001st time.”
“And if you do fail, keep at it. You don’t do something like this without embracing failure constantly. Our approach is to take the most swings at the bat. We’ll get the most home runs, we’ll also get the most strikeouts, and we’re just not going to make the same mistake twice.”
“I think the minute you have a backup plan, you’ve admitted you’re not going to succeed.”
“I’ve been knocked down a lot, and it became really clear that this was what I wanted to do, and I would start this company over 10,000 times if I had to.”
“I don’t want to make an incremental change in some technology in my life. I want to create a whole new technology, and one that is aimed at helping humanity at all levels regardless of geography or ethnicity or age or gender.”
“I have done something, and we have done something, that has changed people’s lives. I would much rather live a life of purpose than one in which I might have other things but not that.”
“And in my mind the most important thing in starting a new company is to be able to find people who can stand by you to achieve the ultimate goal with building the business.”
“It’s the people that you choose to work with that absolutely determine the success or failure of the companies that you may start.”
“Technology has an incredible role to play in enabling of policy issues.”
“I think integration with a smartphone is a huge area of opportunity.”
“Fundamentally, the answers to our challenges in healthcare relies in engaging and empowering the individual.”
“What we’re about is the belief that access to affordable and real-time health information is a basic human right, and it’s a civil right.”
“We know more about our credit cards than we know about our bodies.”
“Patients are empowered by having better access to their own health information, and then by owning their own data.”
“The right to protect the health and well-being of every person, of those we love, is a basic human right.”
“I grew up in a family with parents whose focus was on making a difference. My dad worked in disaster relief, and to me this is my way that I could help to make a difference.”
“At a relatively early age, I began to believe that building a business was perhaps the greatest opportunity for making an impact, because it’s a tool for making a change in the world.”
“On quitting school: that moment is when you find what you were born to do. For me, I reached the point where I was spending all my time doing this anyway, and I was wasting my parents’ money on courses I wasn’t going to. So I had that moment where I was very clear – this is what I wanted to do with my life.”
“What I really want out of life is to discover something new, something mankind didn’t know was possible to do.”
“I believe in the unlimited power of women in the context of science and engineering.”
“I think a lot of young people have incredible ideas and incredible insights, but sometimes they wait before they go give their life to something. What I did was just to start a little earlier.”
“The wonderful thing about the way I was raised is that no one ever told me that I couldn’t do those things.”
“When you find what you love, you do it. That’s it.”
Now hear from her idol (did you notice the black turtleneck?), Steve Jobs.
