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When you're running a company, you have employees - lots of them - that can interrupt your schedule. You have customers that can interrupt your schedule. You have a certain obligation to wave the flag because people expect to get out and wave the flag. The number of ways that others can command your time is high.
In all the difficult decisions that I made through the course of running Loudcloud and Opsware, I never once felt brave. In fact, I often felt scared to death. I never lost those feelings, but after much practice, I learned to ignore them. That learning process might also be called the courage development process.
My father had a series of blue-collar jobs and never made more than $20,000 a year. When I was seven, he got injured on a job. That was a very important point - because of the injury, he couldn't walk, and the company he was working for did not pay him. There was no compensation. So there was no money and no food.
The more often we see the things around us - even the beautiful and wonderful things - the more they become invisible to us. That is why we often take for granted the beauty of this world: the flowers, the trees, the birds, the clouds - even those we love. Because we see things so often, we see them less and less.
What has been the most rewarding moment in your decades of entrepreneurship? Our last annual managers meeting. I gave my motivational talk and then I asked, How many people here started as a forklift operator, a warehouse person, a roof loader, or a truck driver? We had 600 people and almost half of them stood up.
I would love nothing more than me and my family getting green cards, going to L.A. for a year, sitting down with the big Hollywood studios and coming up with the most advanced and awesome Internet distribution platform for movies. It would make Hollywood more money than cinemas, DVDs, and everything else combined.
Too often technology is perceived as the problem rather than the solution; as something to be avoided rather than embraced. This is about as logical as my daughter's observing, while our family was driving through an unfamiliar city, "Trying to read a map while driving causes all the traffic lights to turn green."
The primary thing that any technology startup must do is build a product that's at least 10 times better at doing something than the current prevailing way of doing that thing. Two or three times better will not be good enough to get people to switch to the new thing fast enough or in large enough volume to matter.
If you manage a team of 10 people, its quite possible to do so with very few mistakes or bad behaviors. If you manage an organization of 1,000 people it is quite impossible. At a certain size, your company will do things that are so bad that you never imagined that youd be associated with that kind of incompetence.
You see these terrorists that are flying planes into buildings, right? You see our cities getting shot up in California. You see Paris getting shot up. And then somebody complains when a terrorist gets waterboarded, which quite frankly is no different than what happens on college campuses and frat houses every day.
Obviously, the United States' own founding principles are self-determination. And I think what the United States and our allies want to do is to enable the Syrian people to make that determination. You know, we've seen what violent regime change looks like in Libya and - and the kind of chaos that can be unleashed.
The bad thing about young people starting a company is that sometimes they do it for the wrong reasons or because they have the wrong skill set, but the good thing is that they don't have any of the old paradigms baked into them, so they have a lot of the bright new ideas that are harder to come by as you get older.
Netflix, Amazon, iTunes - whatever platforms emerge - we are looking at as having the same potential that home video had for the movie business. Which means there are entirely new opportunities to monetize our capital investment in content and do so in ways that work for distributors, for consumers and for creators.
Success isn’t something that happens overnight: it’s a process. You have to nurture it along with continuous care, and the best way to do this is to have the right people working with you - not for you, but with you. I can dream alone and strive alone, but true success always requires the help and support of others.
I think it says something about our culture. We, maybe, need a massive therapy session so we can concentrate on what the real issues are. This contraceptive thing. My gosh, it’s so inexpensive. Back in my days, they used Bayer Aspirin for contraception. The gals put it between their knees, and it wasn’t that costly.
The important word there is inspire. The key difference between managers and leaders is that managers tell people what to do, while leaders inspire them to do it. Inspiration comes from three things: clarity of one's vision, courage of their conviction and the ability to effectively communicate both of those things.
Over the years, many executives have said to me with pride: 'Boy, I worked so hard last year that I didn't take any vacation.' I always feel like responding, "You dummy. You mean to tell me you can take responsibility for an eighty-million-dollar project and you can't plan two weeks out of the year to have some fun?
Donald Trump has got unlimited number of insecurities. But the No. 1 one thing, I would say, is his insecurity with his intellect. There's a reason why he always refers to where he went to college and, you know, that, 'I'm a smart person.' You know, it may be narcissism. But I think it really reflects an insecurity.
One of the weaknesses of Indian industry is that in many areas.. like consumer goods.. it is very fragmented. Individually, the companies might not be able to survive. What is needed is a consortium of like companies in one industry, presenting a strong front to the multinationals. The Swiss watch industry did this.
One of the greatest sources of problems in our society arises from people having loads of wrong theories in their heads - often theories that are critical of others - that they won't test by speaking to the relevant people about them. Instead, they talk behind people's backs, which leads to pervasive misinformation.
The Heisenberg principle - If something is closely observed, the odds are it is going to be altered in the process. The more a price pattern is observed by speculators the more prone you have false signals; the more the market is a product of nonspeculative activity, the greater the significance of technical breakout
I've said before, the number one thing that we have to work on is protecting the gay community from sharia law. Now, in the United States, it's probably not a big issue right now, but my brother-in-law is gay, and his partner and I would like them to be able to travel any place in the world without them risking harm.
Most of the fans have ideas about their perfect phone. But many of them can't do it because building a phone is tough. So they would give us feedback about the features that they think should be included in our next model. And if we incorporated that in our new phone, they will share the good news with their friends.
The American movie, in part because America's a melting pot, the cultural hodgepodge that America makes, generates movies that have appeal across all international boundaries. And that's really not true for most domestic film industries. It's no longer true of France and Italy, less true than it used to be of the U.K.
Right now, 70 percent of the people don't have computers. And where they're needed most, people don't have them. We think this will enable anyone to own a computer. We're aiming at everybody who uses a computer as an information access device. The original idea was to build one cheaply enough to put one on every desk.
When you hit send on a text or tweet, you lose ownership of it - but you don't lose responsibility. Every text you have sent may have been saved and could be out there waiting to be used in ways you didn't imagine. Even the most simple of posts can be used out of context, often unintentionally, and change your future.
When you go back to the above names it was a very much narrower situation - the alternatives were far fewer. Today there is much more competition for the 'hero stakes'! And if you think about all the alternatives you have today to spend your time on, the pool of heroes is much broader. It was very much less back then.
I think our slow, humble beginnings in surf shops, ski shops, bike shops, and motorcycle shops have been extremely important for our success. GoPro is all about celebrating an active lifestyle and sharing that with other people. It's authentic. It's not a brand that we went out and bought a bunch of ads for to create.
I am proud of my country. But we need to unite to make a unified India, free of communalism and casteism. We need to build India into a land of equal opportunity for all. We can be a truly great nation if we set our sights high and deliver to the people the fruits of continued growth, prosperity and equal opportunity.
I believe that if we don't make moves to get people who don't play games to understand them, then the position of video games in society will never improve. Society's image of games will remain largely negative, including that stuff about playing games all the time badly damaging you or rotting your brain or whatever.
In a sense technology is a tool of sort of individual choice, individual creativity, individual empowerment, individual access. My kids will never understand that it used to be kind of hard to access and find things, and know what the world knows and see what the world sees. Yet it becomes easier and easier every day.
When you audition for shows in Hollywood, you go in, you do your scene, maybe you get an adjustment. It's sort of easy, and a lot of times it just feels sort of rote and simple. Whereas when you go to New York and you audition for plays, you walk out sweaty and intimidated and nervous and doubting yourself as an actor.
Far too many businesses have been all too eager to lobby for maintaining and increasing subsidies and mandates paid by taxpayers and consumers. This growing partnership between business and government is a destructive force, undermining not just our economy and our political system, but the very foundations of culture.
It takes uncommon guts to stick to one style in the face of all the pressures to 'come up with something new' every six months. It is tragically easy to be stampeded into change. But golden rewards await the advertiser who has the brains to create a coherent image, and the stability to stick with it over a long period.
In setting up a business under the name and meaning of the Golden Rule, I was publicly binding myself, in my business relations, to a principle which had been a real and intimate part of my family upbringing. Our idea was to make money and build business through serving the community with fair dealing and honest value.
I think a lot of people would assume that my job is more about supermodels and naked ladies and all that, and no, it's just really about fashion, merchandise and customers. So the obviously sexy parts - you get to go to the fashion show and all that stuff. It's really just business. That's my story. I'm sticking to it.
Having the ability to be brutally honest with yourself is the greatest challenge you face when creating a business model. Too often we oversell ourselves on the quality of the idea, service, or product. We don't provide an honest assessment of how we fit in the market, why customers will buy from us, and at what price.
The thing that's confusing for investors is that founders don't know how to be CEO. I didn't know how to do the job when I was a CEO. Founder CEOs don't know how to be CEOs, but it doesn't mean they can't learn. The question is... can the founder learn that job and can they tolerate all mistakes they will make doing it?
Three men were laying brick. The first was asked: " What are you doing? He answered: " Laying some brick." The second man was asked: " What are you working for? " He answered: " Five dollars a day." The third man was asked: " What are you doing? He answered: " I am helping to build a great cathedral." Which man are you?
I got plenty of guesses wrong on things in the past as well. I don't want to pretend I have some great insight... But when the global financial crisis came along in 2008 it was scary times if you were in the middle of building $5 billion buildings. It wasn't perfect... I think that I am the luckiest person in Australia.
At least once a year, I meet with a group called the Giving Pledge. It's a group of billionaires - including me, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and Ted Turner - who have pledged to give away most of their money to charity. We meet for three days to talk about what we're doing to help make the planet a better place to live.
If we only look around us, there are a thousand reasons for us not to be happy, and it is simplicity itself to blame our unhappiness on the things we lack in life. It doesn’t take any talent at all to find them. The problem is, the more we focus on the things we don’t have, the more unhappy and more resentful we become.
The Internet is all about accessing entertainment. Realistically, 50 to 80 percent of all traffic is people downloading stuff for free. If you can turn that huge market share into something that you can monetize, even if it is just with ads, you will end up making more money than with all other revenue streams combined.
If your life lease, your existence was canceled tomorrow, what would you wish you had done? What are the things you would like to impact? Start on those and you can change the world. Maybe you can only make your neighborhood a little bit better, or make someone's life a little bit better. Isn't that the kind of purpose?
Usually, you can figure out where a person's mistakes came from if you ask them the genesis of their thought process: 'Why did you do it this way?' As opposed to telling them they did it the wrong way. Understanding their thought process will ultimately help you be able to communicate with them and navigate around them.
I learned early on that one of the secrets of campus leadership was the simplest thing of all: speak to people coming down the sidewalk before they speak to you. I would always look ahead and speak to the person coming toward me. If I knew them I would call them by name, but even if I didn't I would still speak to them.
Toronto is a world-class city. You don't have a debate here about immigration because you need it to just maintain your pensions: that's dependent on people coming in to fund that. And again, I don't want to be controversial, but I think the average education level in Canada is probably higher than in the United States.
Will biofuel usage require land? Absolutely, but we think the ability to use winter cover crops, degraded land, as well as using sources such as organic waste, sewage, and forest waste means that actual land usage will be limited. Just these sources can replace most of our imported oil by 2030 without touching new land.
The history of the music industry is inevitably also the story of the development of technology. From the player piano to the vinyl disc, from reel-to-reel tape to the cassette, from the CD to the digital download, these formats and devices changed not only the way music was consumed, but the very way artists created it.