Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Innovation is hard because solving problems people didn't know they had & building something no one needs look identical at first.
Focus too much on the near-term and you won't get tomorrow's customers, focus too much on the long-term and you won't get today's.
Modularize, don't customize. Build a platform as opposed to building all of the custom technology and custom vertical experiences.
Innovation in tech favors the naive and the stubborn. If you are too rational you won't tackle problems that others once failed at.
The most customer-centric organizations can answer any question by deciding what's best for the customer, without ever having to ask.
Sometimes things are the way they are and can't be changed, other times it's because no one ever tried. Your job is to find the latter.
If you're waiting for encouragement from others, you're doing it wrong. By the time people think an idea is good, it's probably too late.
Any time where the delta b/w what is possible and how things work today is at its widest, that's an opportunity to go build new technology.
Too little process and you can't get good work done. Too much process and you can't get any work done. Most companies never find the middle.
You'll learn more in a day talking to customers than a week of brainstorming, a month of watching competitors, or a year of market research.
Listen to your customers, but don't always build exactly what they're telling you. This is a really key distinction around building enterprise software.
My dad is a chemical engineer, and my mom was a teacher. They were pretty serious about education, but I always thought about things a little bit differently.
You intentionally start small, because you will not be able to compete with an incumbent... because the incumbent is always going to go for the full solution.
I'm certainly not into money and prestige. For me there is simply nothing more exciting than people involved in the creation of great products. That is what drives me.
I'm obsessed with speed. I'm always asking myself, 'Why can't we do things faster? Why can't it happen more efficiently? Why is this requiring three meetings instead of one?'
I think people are always able to achieve more than they think they can. While that's cliche, I don't know if managers think about that enough. You have to set your sights extremely high.
I think people are always able to achieve more than they think they can. While that’s cliche, I don’t know if managers think about that enough. You have to set your sights extremely high.
The dynamic with social is you tend not to have products with 30% market share. It's all or nothing. Email works because we have open standards that let you communicate across any email client.
What happens to the Microsofts, Oracles and IBMs of the world is that when they get big enough, they don't think they need to bring that same level of focus and energy to the end-user experience.
All we're really doing is repeating technologies that were tried 10, 20, 30 years ago... it's just that it was too expensive, too unusable, and we didn't have the enabling technologies to make it possible.
You can look at the cost structure of an incumbent company and discover: where are they not going to be able to drop their prices... because that business model is fundamental to the existence of the company.
Always look for these changing technology factors- any market that has a significant change in the underlying raw materials ...or enabling factors, is an environment that is about to change in a very significant way.
There's a lot of pride that business owners have. It's actually really critical that pride and ownership extends to everyone in the organization. I think of everyone is in the same boat in driving the company forward.
I think bad politics are incredibly dangerous, so it's important to make sure that people are communicating well. Culture and morale are super important. It's best to not force it, but let it happen organically and genuinely.
If you think about the market that we're in, and more broadly just the enterprise software market, the kind of transition that's happening right now from legacy systems to the cloud is literally, by definition, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
I tend to not discriminate when it comes to people I can learn from. Basically, if someone has built a meaningful business in software, technology or media, faced disruption and adversity, and overcame underdog status, I want to know how they did it.
My co-founder Dylan Smith and I left our junior year of college to move to the Bay Area. To the horror of our friends' parents, we actually had two other friends drop out of college to work on the product. The four of us were just working non-stop growing Box.
They can bring the technology in, then you can sell to the enterprise when they want to have better control, better security... you still have the same biz model as a traditional enterprise sw company, but the way to get into the company is through the end user.
Steve Jobs is the most epic entrepreneur of all time. He served as a guiding light for any emerging businessperson who wanted to learn how things should get done. He'll be looked at as one of the best business leaders of all time, and certainly one of the best tech entrepreneurs.
All of a sudden, if you think about the entire ecosystem of connected devices that can pull down information, access content and allow me to share and work and communicate, the vast majority now are not Windows computers. They are iPhones. They are iPads. They are Android devices.
My downtime tends to resemble my uptime. Weekends are workdays, but toned down. Over the whole weekend, I may have five meetings, as opposed to six on a weekday. I used to play piano for 30 minutes at night, but I had to pull that out of my schedule. I don't have time for nonwork stuff.
It's not accidental that products get worse over time; it's because companies stop paying attention to them. They stop caring as much about maintaining the same quality they did when they were just trying to fight for survival and no one would pay attention unless they had the best technology.
My mom is proud of me. But she might not be too happy about the hours I keep or how little I eat. I wake up so late that it would be inappropriate to have breakfast. At most, I will have a snack in the day and dinner. I realize that it's not the healthiest way to live, but it's all I really have time for.
If you're in your early 20s and you're hanging out with a bunch of other people in their early 20s, nobody has a sense of the kinds of problems that real 'workers' run into every day. They're running into a completely different set of problems like 'what's the party going on right now that I should be going to?
If you're in your early 20s and you're hanging out with a bunch of other people in their early 20s, nobody has a sense of the kinds of problems that real 'workers' run into every day. They're running into a completely different set of problems like 'What's the party going on right now that I should be going to?'
I interned at Miramax and subsequently at Paramount because I was really curious about the future of entertainment - how were we going to get films online? While the inspiration for Box didn't come from that experience directly, it was very obvious that bigger businesses had a lot of slow processes and cumbersome technology.
The business models in enterprise have changed pretty dramatically. A huge problem with enterprise software traditionally has been usually you sell to the customer and then they adopt the technology. The great thing about 'freemium' and the new way enterprise software is being sold is you get to try it first and then buy it.
I think because of the iPhone and the fact that we now have a ubiquitous internet, our creativity in the startup space is 10 times different. Every single industry, every single market, is going to be technology-driven in some way. There's an infinite opportunity for startups because now you can go and solve problems that previously looked like they had nothing to do with technology.
I believe there's plenty of market for each; we're talking about an ecosystem that is going to support billions of devices, so a competitive landscape is good for consumers, developers, and the platforms alike. Apple brings a smooth elegance to its devices and platform, with the best marketplace experience to boot. Google brings a higher volume of devices as well as a more diverse ecosystem to interact with. The real story here is that Microsoft is nowhere to be seen, ending a two-decade monopoly and creating biggest opportunity for software startups probably ever.