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The big value of the founder running the company is really two things: the knowledge and the commitment.
Billionaires prefer Black women. They are loyal and guard your interests. Black wives are for grown ups.
The one thing with stress is, you've got to keep your focus on what you can do, not what happened to you.
One person is never as stupid as a group of people. That's why they have lynch mobs, not lynch individuals.
It helps to have founded and run a company if you're going to help somebody run a company who is a founder.
It is very helpful to me, in my job, for people to know me better. A lot of that is, it's a communication job.
Volatility and length, that's the value on an option. 10 years on a startup stock, that's a big valuable thing.
In life, you don't have a level of confrontation and the nonsense you run into when you're a CEO. CEOs aren't born.
In my experience as CEO, I found that the most important decisions tested my courage far more than my intelligence.
The implications of so many people connected to the Internet all the time from the standpoint of education is incredible.
You know what the difference between a vision and a hallucination is? They call it a vision when other people can see it.
Nothing motivates a great employee more than a mission that's so important that it supersedes everyone's personal ambition.
I think that business book reporting, it's all Jim Collins, it's the story of victory; it's success bias over and over again.
A wartime C.E.O. may not delegate. They make every decision based on the next product release. They may use a lot of profanity.
You can't worry about the mistakes, because you're going to make a lot of them. You've got to be thinking about your next move.
Wartime CEO is too busy fighting the enemy to read management books written by consultants who have never managed a fruit stand.
Shareholder activism works when activists understand something about the characteristics of the business that the board doesn't.
Groupon looked like a very high valuation, but any investment in a great company at any stage is almost always a good investment.
You have to be responsible when you're running an organization, and firing people who are your friends is part of that responsibility.
When screening engineers from other companies, its smart to value engineers from great companies more than those from mediocre companies.
Big companies have trouble with innovation. Innovation is about bad ideas, or ideas that look like bad ideas. That's the fundamental thing.
If somebody's going on your board, and you're going to be C.E.O., it will help if that person knows how to be C.E.O., who has done it before.
It turns out that is exactly what product strategy is all about—figuring out the right product is the innovator’s job, not the customer’s job.
I think theres a lot to be said about just enjoying your work. It can be very contrived when people say their work is for the good of mankind.
I think there's a lot to be said about just enjoying your work. It can be very contrived when people say their work is for the good of mankind.
Hire sales people who are really smart problem solvers, but lack courage, hunger and competitiveness, and your company will go out of business.
I emphasize to C.E.O.s, you have to have a story in the minds of the employees. It's hard to memorize objectives, but it's easy to remember a story.
In boxing, you get hit, it's painful, then you sit on the stool when the adrenaline is gone and you feel that pain. And then you fight the next round.
For example, the vast majority of security break-ins occur as a result of problems with known fixes. With an automated system, you can keep up to date.
When the value of the company clearly has fallen below what its assets are worth, having a shareholder who says, 'Let's get a better board' can be helpful.
Many of the people that you lay off will have closer relationships with the people who stay than you do, so treat them with an appropriate level of respect.
As long as people are clear on what they need to do and what's going on, you're very likely to succeed. When nobody is clear, then you're guaranteed to fail.
Most books on management are written by management consultants, and they study successful companies after they've succeeded, so they only hear winning stories.
Early in my career as an engineer, I’d learned that all decisions were objective until the first line of code was written. After that, all decisions were emotional.
As companies move to web-based computing they get a lot more servers, which are difficult to manage and control. All kinds of problems can arise - security, quality and worms.
Look - this is the terror of being a founder & CEO. It is all your fault. Every decision, every person you hire, every dumb thing you buy or do - ultimately, you're at the end.
In my own experience as a C.E.O., I would find myself laying awake at 3 A.M. asking questions about my business, and there weren't management books out there that could help me.
There are no shortcuts to knowledge, especially knowledge gained from personal experience. Following conventional wisdom and relying on shortcuts can be worse than knowing nothing at all.
If the employees fundamentally trust the C.E.O., then communications will be vastly more efficient than if they don't. Telling things as they are is a critical part of building this trust.
In order to build a great technology company, you have to hire lots of incredibly smart people. It's a total waste to have lots of big brains but not let them work on your biggest problems.
How do you make your company a good place to work in general? That's a really really really large and complex set of skills. A lot of it is on the job training, combined with excellent mentorship.
When you found a company, you have the original vision, you make all the original decisions, you know every employee, you kind of know every aspect of the product architecture and its limitations.
To succeed at selling a losing product, you must develop seriously superior sales techniques. In addition, you have to be massively competitive and incredibly hungry to survive in that environment.
How do you make your company a good place to work in general? That's a really, really, really large and complex set of skills. A lot of it is on-the-job training, combined with excellent mentorship.
When I was a CEO, the books on management that I read weren't very much help after the first few months on the job. They were all designed to give you directions on how not to screw up your company.
The important thing about mobile is, everybody has a computer in their pocket. The implications of so many people connected to the Internet all the time from the standpoint of education is incredible.
Most companies that go through layoffs are never the same. They don't recover because trust is broken. And if you're not honest at the point where you're breaking trust anyway, you will never recover.
If I'm in my position at a company, I may not have the knowledge of the C.E.O., I may not know what's possible, or I may not have the creativity, but if I can identify a problem, that's a valuable thing.
Over the last ten years, technological advances have dramatically lowered the financial bar for starting a new company, but the courage bar for building a great company remains as high as it has ever been.
I do think a lot of people are trying to do important things still, and I think it is really a great thing that entrepreneurship is getting easier. When I started, it was just much harder to begin a company.