Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
That's been one of my mantras - focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it's worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.
What I've learned as we've gotten bigger is that it's really, really important for us to take all the opportunities to tell our story, because as we grow and have a bigger impact on cities, if we don't tell our story, somebody else will.
Whenever you complete a task of any size or importance, you feel a surge of energy, enthusiasm, and self-esteem. The more important the completed task, the happier, more confident, and more powerful you feel about yourself and your world.
I chose to embrace the spirit of my mother, who, though she had too many of her own dreams denied, deferred, and destroyed, she still instilled in me, her child, that I could have dreams and that I did have a responsibility and the power.
While good business ideas are plentiful, many entrepreneurs struggle to understand payroll taxes, health care and other thorny issues… In other words, they don't have the financial literacy to scale their businesses and attract investors.
I really believe that if we were from another planet, and we sat down to put our heads together on torture experiments, the concept of sticking a needle into someone and sucking their blood out would probably qualify as a pretty good one.
User experience is everything. It always has been, but it's undervalued and underinvested in. If you don't know user-centered design, study it. Hire people who know it. Obsess over it. Live and breathe it. Get your whole company on board.
If you do genuinely care about people and love them a little, eventually you all have this common goal about where you want to go. They see it, and they believe it, and they become believers with you, and you can achieve wonderful things.
No matter what your current condition, how or where you grew up, or what education or training you feel you lack, you can be successful in your chosen endeavor. It is spirit, fortitude, and hardiness that matter more than where you start.
I'm a designer, but I rely on programmers to bring my ideas to life. By learning to code myself, I think I can make things easier for all of us. Similarly, I want to be able to build things on my own without having to bother a programmer.
Later on in my life, it became a big theme: just being okay and comfortable to take the risk and to have really thick skin and realize not everybody is going to love your product. Get over it, and if you believe in it, keep going forward.
People are so bad at driving cars that computers don't have to be that good to be much better. Any time you stand in line at the D.M.V. and look around, you're like, 'Oh, my God, I wish all these people were replaced by computer drivers.'
Even if I'd wanted to work at Goldman Sachs, they weren't going to hire me, because I was saying things like, 'That's a dumb question' when I was asked something stupid in the interviews. I just didn't have a lot of respect for authority.
If you are an entrepreneur planning to start your own company, I can't think of a better place to begin than by operating your business by the Golden Rule. Make this a high priority; never make a decision that contradicts the Golden Rule.
Everybody has a product to sell—no matter whether you’re an employee, a founder, or an investor. It’s true even if your company consists of just you and your computer. Look around. If you don’t see any salespeople, you’re the salesperson.
About half my work in education is U.S. political reform around school districts and charter schools, and creating more room for entrepreneurial organizations to develop. And about half on technology, which I look at as a global platform.
Obviously, many people may remember me as the first winner of 'The Apprentice,' but prior to that, I was an entrepreneur. I started my first business when I was in college, and then getting my lucky break was when Donald Trump hired me on.
Even at the person-to-person level, to be universally liked is to be relatively ignored. To be disliked by some is to be loved all the more by others. And, specifically, a woman’s overall sex appeal is enhanced when some men find her ugly.
In order for a service to be social, you've really got to start from the ground up. The fact that almost a third of the U.S. population have even heard of Spotify is really because they've seen it on Facebook and friends have been sharing.
I think Wall Street is very important, especially to tech companies. Wall Street will get in their rhythm and go fund tech companies, and tech companies will go create jobs and employ a lot of people, so there's that aspect of Wall Street.
Every major communication tool on the Internet has spam and abuse problems. All email services, blogging services and social networks have to dedicate a significant amount of resources and time to fighting abuse and protecting their users.
Actually, I was the seventh private explorer but the first Canadian 'space clown.' I never dreamed of going into space; I just dreamed of traveling. But I admit that space is an incredible destination and the absolute traveling experience.
The older I get, the more determined I feel to do whatever I can to help release that human potential somehow. Not in a fluffy way nor in a hardcore way. But in that middle ground, that marriage of love and power. I'm not afraid of either.
Beautiful speech doesn't need protection, it's ugly speech that needs protection. We have these cultural norms that allow people to say really ugly things. You don't have to invite them to your dinner party, but you should let them say it.
I love Winston Churchill. I love the wisdom he had, the sagacity. I like people who are independent-minded. People who aren't part of clans or systems, who are talented and free, and able to do things without being corrupted by the system.
At some point the Japanese, Chinese and Saudi buyers of US and European Government bonds will see just what miserable value they offer. Then governments may have to stop all the runaway spending and bailouts and even put up interest rates.
The rise of broadband and growing ubiquity of Internet access excites me the most. The world changes a lot when, no matter where you are - in the middle of a deserted highway or in a bustling city - you can get high speed broadband access.
With Akismet there was an interesting dilemma. Is it for the good of the world Akismet being secret and being more effective against spammers, versus it being open and less effective? It seemed more people would be helped by blocking spam.
Philip Greenspun had a huge impact on me. He was the first person I knew of that embraced online communities, created a real business around open source, gave back to the community through education, and inspired me to explore photography.
Because I was poor I had one special advantage. When you are poor, and basic survival is your concern, you have no alternative but to be an entrepreneur. You must take action to survive just as you must take action to seize an opportunity.
Don't let people who you may respect and who you believe know what they're talking about, don't let them tell you it can't be done because often they will tell you it can't be done, and it's just because they don't have the courage to try.
One of the challenges in networking is everybody thinks it's making cold calls to strangers. Actually, it's the people who already have strong trust relationships with you, who know you're dedicated, smart, a team player, who can help you.
One thing I learned in '97, when I thought the right time to found a company was during a swing-up, is that it's much better to start during an economic downturn. Partnerships are easier; hiring is easier; and the competition starts later.
Blitzscaling is always managerially inefficient - and it burns through a lot of capital quickly. But you have to be willing to take on these inefficiencies in order to scale up. That's the opposite of what large organizations optimize for.
In simple terms, I realised that food is the most fundamental need for a person. In difficult economic times, people's priorities change, and they might be willing to do something that secures for them the lowest possible weekly food bill.
Oftentimes, heavy weights can tear the muscle fiber causing it to bulk, but using a lighter weight for a longer duration and allowing your body to move in many different ways to target all of the muscles will lengthen them without tearing.
There is an interesting point about the price of success: It must always be paid in full-and in advance. Everyone wants to be successful. Everyone wants to be healthy, happy, thin, and rich. But most people are not willing to pay the price.
We see very, very high rates of C-sections, Cesarean sections, in India. Lots of reasons for it, high levels of malnutrition have meant that women have very small pelvic areas often, so if they have larger babies, it's very hard to deliver.
Just start thinking about all the different services in your life. Like getting your dry cleaning picked up and dropped off. Nobody has done the Uber of that yet. But that will be Uberfied. You will arrange your dry cleaning via your phone.
Apple Music is trying to create an entire pop culture experience that includes audio and video. If South Park walks into my office, I'm not going to say, 'You're not musicians.' We're going to do whatever hits pop culture smack on the nose.
I can't imagine that companies are uninteresting if they don't have a billion users. But I do believe, to have mass scale, you have to be in the many-hundreds-of-millions-of-users range, and there are not that many companies that get there.
Some of history's cleverest business minds understood the power of share platforms, from the aggressive titans who made fortunes building the nation's railroads, to Conrad Hilton, who created the first premier brand of international hotels.
When I started Net-a-Porter, I knew nothing. And I was pregnant. Starting a new venture and being pregnant for the first time are pretty similar in many ways. If you knew what was going to happen to you, you wouldn't venture down that road.
It's extremely hard to build a company with a product that everyone loves, is free and has no business model, and then to innovate a business model. I did that with Kazaa, had half a billion downloads but that wasn't a sustainable business.
In February of 1996, about six months after I created eBay, I started receiving a spate of complaints. Everyone was complaining about each other. I felt very much like I was a parent who had to adjudicate the brothers beating each other up.
Microfinance initiatives are very high-touch models. The loan officer meets with local groups of borrowers every week, they share tips and techniques. There's a lot of training and learning that goes on, which adds to the cost of the model.
One of the metaphors that I use for start-ups is, you throw yourself off a cliff and assemble your airplane on the way down. If you don't solve the right problem at the right time, that's the end. Mortality puts priorities into sharp focus.
I think 'Settlers of Catan' is such a well-designed board game - it's the board game of entrepreneurship - that I made a knockoff called 'Startups of Silicon Valley.' It's literally - it's the same rules but just a different skin set to it.
I didn't want people to say: Stelios does everything on the cheap at work, and in private he lives in the lap of luxury. That's not me. I don't need those status symbols. I don't need a private jet either when I can go everywhere with Easy.
And so the idea was, well maybe you can take an Atari video game machine, where people plug in a game cartridge, and plug in a modem, and tie that into a telephone, and essentially turn that game in the machine into an interactive terminal.