Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I was lucky - I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents' garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees.
Marc Lore has been a mentor of mine for a long time. He taught me how to hire people and how to do the hardest thing in business, which is to make a great culture. I believe Marc is the most innovative and ambitious e-commerce entrepreneur on the planet.
People love fast. When you're fast people think you're smart, think your products are of higher quality, think your management is of higher quality, think that you're worth more and they're willing to pay more money for it. So, I'm really big into speed.
When you make a to-do list, you should also make a to-not-do list. Warren Buffet was asked about the secret to success, and he said that it was saying no to almost everything. Some of those little tasks won't matter as long as you get the big tasks done.
For me, as someone growing up in a working-class suburb in Stockholm, I couldn't afford all the music. So back in '98, '99, I was really thinking about how I could get all the music and do it in a legal way while at the same time compensating the artist.
Most start-up companies fail and it is smart public policy to help entrepreneurs increase their odds of succeeding. But, the biggest loss to our economy is not all the start-ups that didn't make it: It's the ones that might have been created but weren't.
The currency of blogging is authenticity and trust... you pay folks to blog about a product and you compromise that. I would almost care about this, but it's so obvious to everyone that this is either a joke or an idiot that there is nothing more to say.
I casually advise a few young companies, and I'm always surprised when I see them overthinking simple problems, adding too much structure too early, and trying to get formal too soon. Start-ups should embrace their scrappiness, not rush to toss it aside.
People go to the front page of BuzzFeed partly because they've seen a bunch of things in their stream, and they're like, 'Oh, I like this site. Why don't I go to the source?' I think that happens. But also people are going to look for something to share.
When people say that college isn't worthwhile and paying all this money isn't worthwhile, I really disagree. I think those experiences and those classes that may not necessarily seem applicable in the moment end up coming back to you time and time again.
I am an obsessive personality. And if you are an obsessive personality, you need to be aware of it and be able to drive it with success. There are moments in your life when you are driving it well, but you shift and you shift badly and you hurt yourself.
At Tencent, we may be businessmen, but we are still chasing our IT, our science. We are still striving to create something really cool, trying to create things we couldn't even imagine without our new technologies. I am still clinging to this enthusiasm.
I believe that there is no such thing as a subordinate. If the air-conditioning ceases to work in our building, then the repair technician becomes more important than the chairman of the board. We're all people working together toward a common objective.
We're not done yet, but two things WordPress has been able to exemplify is that open source can create great user experiences and that it's possible to have a successful commercial entity and a wider free software community living and working in harmony.
Once poverty is gone, we'll need to build museums to display its horrors to future generations. They'll wonder why poverty continued so long in human society - how a few people could live in luxury while billions dwelt in misery, deprivation and despair.
Walk to work, even if it's four miles. Ride a bike to work. Drive a different way. On your way there, try to find beauty. You'd be surprised how much more of the neighborhood you can perceive and experience when you're looking for unique spots of beauty.
Founders have continually struggled with and adapted the 'big business' tools, rules, and processes taught in business schools when startups failed to execute 'the plan,' never admitting to the entrepreneurs that no startup executes to its business plan.
I'll always stay connected with Apple. I hope that throughout my life I'll sort of have the thread of my life and the thread of Apple weave in and out of each other, like a tapestry. There may be a few years when I'm not there, but I'll always come back.
Almost every profession I look at where you require human labor or you require intelligence, I see computers being able to do better than us within the next 10 years. I'm talking about a mass replacement of humans with artificial intelligence and robots.
It doesn't matter where you came from, it doesn't matter how poor you are, it doesn't matter where your family was. It all doesn't matter. You can achieve anything if you have really clear goals and if you work really hard to learn what you need to learn.
Leaders are made, not born. You learn to become a leader by doing what other excellent leaders have done before you. You become proficient in your job or skill, and then you become proficient at understanding the motivations and behaviors of other people.
Everyone is an entrepreneur. The only skills you need to be an entrepreneur: an ability to fail, an ability to have ideas, to sell those ideas, to execute on those ideas, and to be persistent so even as you fail you learn and move onto the next adventure.
How can it fail to smash and shatter the petty provincialism and narrow nantionalism ... making of this world a tragic mosaic of hostility and hate? How can this fabulous new force in the sky fail to serve the hope of teh world and the peace of the world?
One of the things that's been crazy for us has been the speed at which news can break on Digg, because it's powered by a mass of humans versus a machine that has to go out and crawl and find the information and then determine its relevance mathematically.
I am not merely satisfied in making money for myself, for I am endeavoring to provide employment for hundreds of women of my race. ... I want to say to every Negro woman present, don't sit down and wait for the opportunities to come. Get up and make them!
The number of small businesses in the United States totals about 25 million. Because most of these have a local trading territory, relatively few advertise online. Online advertising reaches the masses of the Internet world, whether they are local or not.
WordPress.com is the only service of its kind that not only lets you export your data, but gives you an open source package you can run on pretty much any web host out there to run your own instance of the software. So the freedom is really in your hands.
From my perspective, I think the question of how we build a better future is an extremely important overarching question, and I think it's become obscured from us because we no longer think it's possible to have a meaningful conversation about the future.
I want people to be entrepreneurs, but I want them to do it for the right reasons, because they think they can change the world, because they think they have got something of value to give to the world. Not because they think they can make a lot of money.
But as an entrepreneur you have to feel like you can jump out of an aeroplane because you're confident that you'll catch a bird flying by. It's an act of stupidity, and most entrepreneurs go splat because the bird doesn't come by, but a few times it does.
MySpace is like a bar, Facebook is like the BBQ you have in your back yard with friends and family, play games, share pictures. Facebook is much better for sharing than MySpace. LinkedIn is the office, how you stay up to date, solve professional problems.
People make basic assumptions based on what they have now. But you have to ask yourself, 'Is this really what people are going to be doing in five years?' Very few people ask themselves what they would actually want instead if they could wave a magic wand.
Mindfulness has helped me succeed in almost every dimension of my life. By stopping regularly to look inward and become aware of my mental state, I stay connected to the source of my actions and thoughts and can guide them with considerably more intention.
Only think about the people you enjoy. Only read the books you enjoy, that make you happy to be human. Only go to the events that actually make you laugh or fall in love. Only deal with the people who love you back, who are winners and want you to win too.
The Nobel Prize is worth $1.5 million, but that's not the issue. Do the distinguished scientists who win the Nobel Prize need the money? Probably not. The honor is more important the money, and that's the case with the prize for African leadership as well.
If you contrast the productivity that comes from a networked or capitalist distribution of resources versus a centralized planning system, frequently referred to as communism or socialism, the network approach does much better when it's applied accurately.
We think that computers are the most remarkable tools that humankind has ever come up with, and we think that people are basically tool users. So if we can just get lots of computers to lots of people, it will make some qualitative difference to the world.
Before I start a company, I always invest at least one year to knowing that sector thoroughly. I research about almost everything related to that business - competition, market potential, revenue model, legal and regulatory obligations, among other aspects.
We don't want a third party who may or may not have our best interests in mind or our crew members' best interests in mind because they may be serving a union of one of our competitors. They are trying to equalize us and take away our competitive advantage.
To have a successful career, you have to approach it as an entrepreneur, even if you are working for someone else. Your career is your own private business. You have to market yourself and your abilities and knowledge just as you would a product or service.
Everyone asks me why someone Turkish is making Greek yogurt. In Greece, it is not called 'Greek yogurt.' Everywhere in the world it is called 'strained yogurt.' But because it was introduced in this country by a Greek company, they called it 'Greek yogurt.'
I think globalization is a great thing. And now a lot of people complain about globalization; a lot of people don't like, you know, the globalize of the concept, the idea of the results. I think the globalization is a great idea and to create a lot of jobs.
Impact investing has become a broad umbrella that includes all investing with a focus on both financial return and social impact, but in its best form, impact investing prioritizes impact over returns and achieves outcomes that traditional investing cannot.
I think what really people want is just a few things done really, really well. And if you think about ever day of your life, the things you really appreciate aren't the complicated things. They're the simple things that work just the way you expect them to.
I think I give myself high marks being an entrepreneur and entrepreneuring a big idea about how popular social gaming could be. But I learned a lot of hard lessons on the CEO front... and do not give myself very high marks as a CEO of a large-scale company.
A startup is the largest endeavor over which you can have definite mastery. You can have agency not just over your own life, but over a small and important part of the world. It begins by rejecting the unjust tyranny of Chance. You are not a lottery ticket.
The Lean Startup process builds new ventures more efficiently. It has three parts: a business model canvas to frame hypotheses, customer development to get out of the building to test those hypotheses, and agile engineering to build minimum viable products.
The attackers are the people with bold, innovative ideas who are trying to disrupt the status quo and usher in a better way. The defenders are the incumbents who try to defend what they have. We need to bring an attacker mindset to whatever we choose to do.
The unions are the worst thing that ever happened to education because it's not a meritocracy. It turns into a bureaucracy, which is exactly what has happened. The teachers can't teach and administrators run the place and nobody can be fired. It's terrible.
I thought deeply about this. I ended up concluding that the worst thing that could possibly happen as we get big and as we get a little more influence in the world is if we change our core values and start letting it slide, I can't do that. I'd rather quit.