Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help make the big choices in life. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.
We make tools for people. Tools to create, tools to communicate. The age we're living in, these tools surprise you. ... That's why I love what we do. Because we make these tools, and we're constantly surprised with what people do with them.
Madonna is an athlete; she has to be treated like a professional athlete. She doesn't work out for six hours a day, though, like some of the press says. She never works out for more than two hours a day, and then only when she has the time.
The predominant idea behind globalization, in its most virulent form, is an unpleasant kind of social Darwinism - that the world is for winners not losers, that only the successful count, that money is considerably more important than votes.
Since the governments are in the pockets of businesses, who's going to control this most powerful institution? Business is more powerful than politics, and it's more powerful than religion. So it's going to have to be the vigilante consumer.
The American Dream is still alive out there, and hard work will get you there. You don't necessarily need to have an Ivy League education or to have millions of dollars startup money. It can be done with an idea, hard work and determination.
You take a picture of yourself in some exceptional situation - skydiving or whatever. People always post those photos because it works - you're saying something about yourself that begs a conversation and that's what the users are there for.
Progress in manufacturing is measured by the production of high quality goods. The unit of progress for Lean Startups is validated learning-a rigorous method for demonstrating progress when one is embedded in the soil of extreme uncertainty.
The process of seeking fame is a process of seeking dehumanization. You are looking for it. You want it. But you only want the good parts of it. You want the part where people see you as just a collection of positive things and nothing else.
I wanted to have a global company, so I chose a global name. Alibaba is easy to spell, and people everywhere associate that with "Open, Sesame," the command that Ali Baba used to open doors to hidden treasures in One Thousand and One Nights.
Hong Kong people say Hong Kong needs to preserve its uniqueness. I say Hong Kong's uniqueness is in its diversity, its tolerance of difference cultures... China does not want to see Hong Kong in decline. I have full confidence in its future.
I definitely believe people should pay for copyrighted works. And the laws are sufficient: They already require you to pay for copyright work. There's no confusion. The problem is...it's a heck of a lot easier to steal MP3s than to buy them.
Chobani did a really wonderful yogurt campaign on 'Instagram' to shift perceptions away from the fact that they were just yogurt. And they had a 7-point incremental lift on shifting that perception through a brand advertisement on Instagram.
People don't work in a dotcom because they have to. There are many professions that don't require that sort of time. But people sign up because they want to make world-changing differences, to build something that affects millions of people.
Remember, if you do the things you ought to do when you ought to do them, then someday you can do the things you want to do when you want to do them…Whatever you do or dream you can do—begin it. Boldness has genius and power and magic in it.
Skype is easy enough to use so that people don't need to be tech savvy - a lot of users just want to communicate with their friends and family, and they find this is the easiest, cheapest way. If you can use a Web browser, you can use Skype.
When we think about online learning, it's such 'early days.' Bill Gates is a wildly smart insightful guy. Yet, even a guy as smart and insightful as that, 30 years ago can say things like,'Who's every going to need more than 640K of memory?'
Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It's not about money. It's about the people you have, how you're led, and how much you get it.
When theres no other dude in the car, the cost of taking an Uber anywhere becomes cheaper than owning a vehicle. So the magic there is, you basically bring the cost below the cost of ownership for everybody, and then car ownership goes away.
After Scour, I started a company called Red Swoosh. The idea was to take those litigants who sued us for a huge amount of money and turn them into customers with the same technology. I wanted to get them to pay me. It was a revenge business.
The harsh reality is that if you are middle-aged, write computer code for a living, and earn a six-figure salary, you're headed for the unemployment lines. Your market value declines as you age, and it becomes harder and harder to get a job.
I think it's time to have a celebration of life and renew our vows. And this time we're going to write the vows because they're going to mean a lot more. We certainly put the 'in sickness and in health' vow to the test the last year and half.
All of us prepare our own lunch. If we don't like our jobs, if we don't like the state of our relationships, if we don't like what's happening to our spiritual lives - we have no one to blame but ourselves. Because God has given us free will.
Entrepreneurs always pitch their idea as 'the X of Y,' so this is going to be 'the Microsoft of food.' And yet disruptive innovations usually don't have that character. Most of the time, if something seems like a good idea, it probably isn't.
Most entrepreneurs don't need as many customers as they think. A lot of people think 10 is too few for a sample. But if all 10 refused a product, why is that not enough? If you want 100, 1,000 or a million customers, you first have to get 10.
Entrepreneurs always pitch their idea as 'the X of Y', so this is going to be 'the Microsoft of food.' And yet disruptive innovations usually don't have that character. Most of the time, if something seems like a good idea, it probably isn't.
Trust the young. Young people have a lot to contribute, but generation after generation, those who reach power protect that power rather than teach others how to attain it. I resolved that if I ever became successful, I would trust the young.
The owner of a company with supertight margins - say, a restaurant, retailer, or producer of commodity goods - would be a fool not to keep a close eye on the numbers. But when I make big decisions, numbers are seldom, if ever, the tiebreaker.
When [competitors are] in the shower in the morning, they're thinking about how they're going to get ahead of one of their top competitors. Here in the shower, we're thinking about how we are going to invent something on behalf of a customer.
In my home office, I have two large, 30-inch computer monitors - a Mac and a PC. They share the same mouse and keyboard, so I can type or copy and paste between them. I'll typically do Web stuff on the Mac and e-mail and chat stuff on the PC.
All human beings are very creative - full of potential, full of energy... So, money kind of allows them to express it... And if you're successful, you can take more money. You can expand your capacity, reach next level of capacity, and so on.
'Being green' is commendable, but I hope that people don't take too much pride and self-adoration because they shut off the water when they brushed their teeth. The truth of the matter is, conservation alone will do little to save our planet.
I think people in Europe are generally pessimistic about the future. They have low expectations; they're not working hard to change things. When you're a slacker with a pessimistic view of the future, you're likely to meet those expectations.
When we think about online learning, it's such 'early days.' Bill Gates is a wildly smart insightful guy. Yet, even a guy as smart and insightful as that, 30 years ago can say things like, 'Who's every going to need more than 640K of memory?'
If you believe that some day it's going to happen, some day it probably will happen. You just have to make sure you're there when it's happening, and ideally you're at the front of the parade, and the principle beneficiary of when it happens.
One quality of entrepreneurship is just persistence, not giving up because you have road blocks and also not giving in because other people tell you that you're nuts. You are nuts and you should be proud of it. Stick with what you believe in.
We have to move away from the entirely ad-supported business because the needs of it means that it has to keep driving into privacy, and that's not good for anyone because we all need to have something about us that is secret from some people.
For many of these people the social is just a mirror of themselves. I'm not against the social, but I want something genuinely social, not something that has been fetishized as social so that a group of people can feel better about themselves.
People have told us that accessing all of their Google stuff with one account makes life a whole lot easier. But we've also heard that it doesn't make sense for your Google+ profile to be your identity in all the other Google products you use.
You are where you are and what you are because of yourself, nothing else. Nature is neutral. Nature doesn't care. If you do what other successful people do, you will enjoy the same results and rewards that they do. And if you don't, you won't.
Many of our students say, 'We wish we had a mentor in high school. We wish we had someone we could spend more time with, who paid more attention to us, who I could sit down with and talk to when I had a problem.' So relationships are critical.
The internet thing is what I have the greatest problem with. I don't know if anyone in the media gets the internet thing and Harvey Norman. I think they have some strange interpretation of it that bears no resemblance to what actually happens.
There are a lot of studies about small businesses and how they make a difference in their community and create a lot of jobs and values. So we need to focus on small businesses or entrepreneurs who want to start manufacturing or making things.
Certainly, Continental has taken advantage of pipe and sponsored pipeline projects where we could. As a historic shipper, we have put a lot of oil on pipe. We have over half of our oil on pipe coming out of the Bakken. We feel good about that.
It's very important as a startup to get early press because, although it may not be a large number of people, having a 'Fast Company' story - some of those people that read it are going to be your next employees and hires, your next investors.
We've never much liked the idea of charging a participation tax, a phrase we coined to represent what it feels like when a software company charges you more money for each additional user. Participation taxes discourage usage across a company.
India is a fertile ground for entrepreneurs, given its large pool of world-class talent and resources. India's ability to generate wealth and create social good will come if we let entrepreneurs flourish by encouraging and enabling innovation.
Chef and Ubuntu are often inseparable in serious server deployments, making mutual integration a must for our users. We're excited to offer Chef as part of the Ubuntu distribution and to deliver easy bare metal provisioning with MAAS and Chef.
The basis of the free market is anytime you can generate revenue or profit, you've created value in excess of the resources you consume in a society. That's probably the most unbiased utility function there is, as opposed to someone's opinion.
What we are trying to do is to create a social business in Bangladesh, a joint venture to create restaurants for common people. Good, healthy food at affordable prices so that people don't have to opt for food that is unhealthy and unhygienic.