Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I don't want to fail, of course. But even though I didn't know how bad things really were, I still had a lot to think about before I said yes. I had to consider the implications for Pixar, for my family, for my reputation. I decided that I didn't really care, because this is what I want to do. If I try my best and fail, well, I've tried my best.
So let's not use a stylus. We're going to use the best pointing device in the world. We're going to use a pointing device that we're all born with - born with ten of them. We're going to use our fingers. We're going to touch this with our fingers. And we have invented a new technology called multi-touch, which is phenomenal. It works like magic.
Women want to be free to choose from the same range of options that men take for granted. In our quest for equal pay, equal access to education and opportunities, we have made great strides. But until women can move freely and think freely in their homes, on the streets, in the workplace without the fear of violence, there can be no real freedom.
My take on the whole dot-com bubble was that a lot of people who wanted to make a lot of money got too excited and hyped up the commercial aspects of the Internet prematurely. I think the vision of the Internet as a democratizing medium - as everyone's printing press - is real. We got distracted from that by the mass hallucinations of the bubble.
In the beginning I just wanted to survive. For the first three years, we made zero revenue. I remember many times when I was trying to pay up, the restaurant owner would say, 'Your bill was paid.' And there would be a note saying, 'Mr. Ma, I'm your customer on the Alibaba platform. I made a lot of money, and I know you don't, so I paid the bill.'
When it comes to solving problems of poverty, impact investing can act as a catalyst, but it is not a silver bullet. Successful businesses serving the poor need more than investment capital. They also need infrastructure to enable effective distribution, strong regulatory systems, access to markets, technical assistance as they scale up, and more
Thinking about how disturbingly herdlike people become in so many different contexts - mimetic theory forces you to think about that, which is knowledge that's generally suppressed and hidden. As an investor-entrepreneur, I've always tried to be contrarian, to go against the crowd, to identify opportunities in places where people are not looking.
Internationalism means that we can see into the dark corners of the world, and hold those companies to account when they are devastating forests or employing children as bonded labour. Globalization is the complete opposite, its rules pit country against country and workers against workers in the blinkered pursuit of international competitiveness.
Your ability to negotiate, communicate, influence, and persuade others to do things is absolutely indispensable to everything you accomplish in life. The most effective men and women in every area are those who can quite competently organize the cooperation and assistance of other people toward the accomplishment of important goals and objectives.
I call Alibaba '1,001 mistakes.' We expanded too fast, and then in the dot-com bubble, we had to have layoffs. By 2002, we had only enough cash to survive for 18 months. We had a lot of free members using our site, and we didn't know how we'd make money. So we developed a product for China exporters to meet U.S. buyers online. This model saved us.
That's the great irony of allowing passionate people to work from home. A manager's natural instinct is to worry that her workers aren't getting enough work done. But the real threat is that they will wind up working too hard. And because the manager isn't sitting across from her worker anymore, she can't look in the person's eyes and see burnout.
When I finally had the chance to make my childhood dream a reality - as a co-founder and chairman of Moon Express - my goal was to broaden participation in lunar exploration, and connect the common person to its results. We plan to send robotic rovers - not humans - to the Moon to search for precious metals and rare minerals on the Moon's surface.
In 1980, business at my company, Chuck E. Cheese's, was thriving and I was feeling flush. So I bought a very large house on the Champ de Mars in Paris, right between the Eiffel Tower and the Ecole Militaire. The home was quite amazing: At six stories, it spanned 15,000 square feet and featured marble staircases and a swimming pool in the basement.
With our technology, with objects, literally three people in a garage can blow away what 200 people at Microsoft can do. Literally can blow it away. Corporate America has a need that is so huge and can save them so much money, or make them so much money, or cost them so much money if they miss it, that they are going to fuel the object revolution.
I used to be a computer engineer, and I can make really good code, and we can make systems that work really well, and we can make the application a great experience, but when you have to translate bits to atoms, you need folks who are used to working with city governments, with state governments, and so I like to say we're in a political campaign.
I'm never gonna owe money because every time I get a dollar, I put it into another business, whether it's to buy goods or develop other companies. You don't have money; you have companies. That's one business model. That's mine. And I only associate with other people that are putting up their own money, 'cause they're the only ones that can relate.
Exporting oil would not drive up prices at the pump. American drivers buy refined products, which the U.S. already exports. Many studies - from a range of institutions and government agencies, including the Congressional Budget Office and the Energy Information Administration - have shown that lifting the export ban could actually lower gas prices.
I'm sure everything has a bearing on what I'm doing. My family is a lower-middle-class family, there's lots of children, seven brothers, two sisters grew up together, fighting with each other, went to school. My mother went to school up to 4th grade. My father went to school up to 8th grade. So that's about the education level we had in the family.
Smart tech investor thinks about: a) future product roadmap, b) bottoms-up market size & growth, c) talent and skill of team. Essentially you are valuing things that have not yet happened, and the likelihood of the CEO and team being able to make them happen. Finance people find this appalling, but investors who do this well can make a lot of money.
One of the great strengths of American culture is this empowerment of individual, is the individual being able to be entrepreneurial, create new things. But you create a whole group of people to make great companies. It's employees and investors and customers and partners. The fabric of society, of a network of relations, is key to being successful.
If it could save a person's life, could you find a way to save ten seconds off the boot time? If there were five million people using the Mac, and it took ten seconds extra to turn it on every day, that added up to three hundred million or so hours per year people would save, which was the equivalent of at least one hundred lifetimes saved per year.
We are a very open, very democratic site, which means we get all sorts of people. We do get some bad guys who are a few fries short of a Happy Meal. So we have to enlist the aid of our community to help us. The lesson implicit in this is that people will help you out and behave in a really good way. If you trust them, they will respond to that trust.
Breakthrough ideas look crazy, nuts. It’s hard to think this way — I see it in other people’s body language, and I can feel it in my own, where I sometimes feel like I don’t even care if it’s going to work, I can’t take more change. O.K., Google, O.K., Twitter—but Airbnb? People staying in each other’s houses without there being a lot of axe murders?
When I hire somebody really senior, competence is the ante. They have to be really smart. But the real issue for me is, Are they going to fall in love with Apple? Because if they fall in love with Apple, everything else will take care of itself. They'll want to do what's best for Apple, not what's best for them, what's best for Steve, or anybody else.
We had the hardware expertise, the industrial design expertise and the software expertise, including iTunes. One of the biggest insights we have was that we decided not to try to manage your music library on the iPod, but to manage it in iTunes. Other companies tried to do everything on the device itself and made it so complicated that it was useless.
I finally understood: In order to contribute to Africa, I would have to know myself better and be clearer about my goals. I would have to be ready to take Africa on its own terms, not mine, and to learn my limits and present myself not as a do-gooder with a big heart, but as someone with something to give and gain by being there. Compassion wasn't enough
At Silicon Valley, I'm extremely sympathetic to the revolutionary response. I not only agree with it emotionally. I agree with it practically. And the only thing I disagree with is, I don't think Donald Trump is that. Trump is blow it up for no good reason at all. You want to actually do revolution with a target, with an idea, with building a new system.
Consent of the Networked will become the seminal book firmly establishing the responsibility of those who control the architecture and the politics of the network to the citizens who inhabit our new digital world. Consent of the Networked should be required reading for all of those involved in building our networked future as well as those who live in it.
The key is to be true to your community's norms and values. You can't just force yourself on people and try to sell them something they don't want - that's good advice for marketers generally, but particularly on community-driven sites like MySpace. You have to find ways to add value to your members' lives while being consistent with your brand's identity.
Outside of a Grand Slam, I don't think there's a tournament in the world that has this many top players representing their countries. It's really remarkable that we have this many No. 1's. And with so many countries being represented, it's going to give the fans from Las Vegas who are from those countries a chance to come out and root for their countrymen.
Entrepreneurs are all a little crazy. There is a fine line between an entrepreneur and a crazy person. Crazy people see and feel things that others don't. An entrepreneur's dream is often a kind of madness, and it is almost as isolating. What differentiates the entrepreneur from the crazy person is that the former gets other people to believe in his vision.
When you reach an obstacle, turn it into an opportunity. You have the choice. You can overcome and be a winner, or you can allow it to overcome you and be a loser. The choice is yours and yours alone. Refuse to throw in the towel. Go that extra mile that failures refuse to travel. It is far better to be exhausted from success than to be rested from failure.
Instead of concentrating on the war against poverty, global attention is focused on another kind of slaughter - on something that is intangible and yet being tackled by all the possible military means we can muster. And all the lofty declarations by world leaders about combatting poverty that were lauded by the General Assembly turned out to be damp squibs.
I do think that people have an obligation to give back but that doesn't necessarily mean that you give back just the traditional way. Maybe there's new ways to give back and make a contribution. I'm looking forward to some mix of philanthropy - maybe through a somewhat different prism - as well as helping entrepreneurs build some significant new businesses.
Recruiting is hard. It's just finding the needles in the haystack. You can't know enough in a one-hour interview. So, in the end, it's ultimately based on your gut. How do I feel about this person? What are they like when they're challenged? I ask everybody that: 'Why are you here?' The answers themselves are not what you're looking for. It's the meta-data.
A lot has changed in India in the last decade. We can attribute the growth of India's startup ecosystem to the increased penetration of affordable smartphones and data connectivity across the country. Technology is no longer a luxury. People across generation and geographies are making use of mobile technologies. Startups have capitalised on this phenomenon.
When you remain angry with another person, you give away your emotional control to that person each time you think of him or here. You allow him or her to control your emotions at long distance. By not forgiving, you allow that person to run your emotional life, exactly as if he or she were right there with you and the situation was occurring all over again.
United States has always been very close to Africa and it's very sad now to see that Africa has a lot more friends - a lot more engagements with the Chinese, with the Indians, with the Brazilians as the United States retreats. Actually, Africa is a wonderful place to do business and American business is missing a big opportunity by really overlooking Africa.
Success is not necessarily determined by material possessions or accomplishments. You can enjoy success simply by reaching the point where you are perfectly content with your life in every respect and you feel no dissatisfaction or pressing need for anything else. In this sense, you can be a success sitting by yourself in a quiet place contemplating the world.
Our advertising partnership with Allegiant Air is a natural fit for us. Branding encompasses everything from good customer service to strategic advertising positioning and targeting. This in-air branding exercise will allow us to target a specific player demographic, while continuing to expand the presence of our brand throughout the continental United States.
There were sirens and the cops were there and they took me to the police station and I got arrested, it was really embarrassing. They actually just- they impeached me over the whole thing, they tried, well, they did impeach me, but I didn't have to actually stop being president, so it was okay. The police weren't actually that involved, it was mostly Congress.
The vision behind our idea is a world where people don't carry hazardous chemicals in their bodies, the environment is free of toxic pollutants, and the economy diligently conserves its natural resources for consumers and future generations. We want to make it easier for consumers to create this world through their purchasing decisions and everyday activities.
Because in our boom times, everything is growing, usually, you know, the kind of things that come to mind are Wild, Wild, West, or land grabs, you know, these sorts of things, in order to make something, you know, kind of to grow into the future and to get all the growth that you need to have. So you tend to hire a lot because you're running fast to the future.
I think what people love about the Steve Jobs story is not just the track record at Apple, but that comeback story, that he was thrown out of Apple, came back and built the company even greater. And that perseverance is so important in terms of entrepreneurship. And nobody is a better role model for that, for all entrepreneurs all over the world than Steve Jobs.
Our approach is to think of companies not as businesses but as collections of people. We [Apple]want to qualitatively change the way people work. We don't just want to help them do word processing faster or add numbers faster. We want to change the way they can communicate with one another. We're seeing less paper flying around and more quality of communication.
So we went to Atari and said, 'Hey, we've got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we'll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we'll come work for you.' And they said, 'No.' So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, 'Hey, we don't need you. You haven't got through college yet.'
All the businesses from the beginning of history have struggled with product development (assuming there is a market, doing the market testing and so on). But now they start with customer development. Get the customer who says, "Yes. I want that. I need it. I wanna use it. I'll pay for it." And then you go back and work with your engineers. It is changing the world!
Many [business] people focus on what is static, black and white. Yet great algorithms can be rewritten. A business process can be defined better. A business model can be copied. But the speed of execution is dynamic within you and can never be copied. When you have an idea, figure out the pieces you need quickly, go to market, believe in it, and continue to iterate.
There are 60 million generators in Nigeria. The generator owners and distributors have a strong incentive to not encourage the distribution of solar and other alternative energies, even though it's better for the country, it's better for people. As a world, we've got to get more serious about confronting those obstacles. This knows no culture, no race, no ethnicity.
If we are looking for one single action which will enable the poor to overcome their poverty, I would go for credit. Money is power. I have been arguing that credit should be accepted as a human right. If we can come up with a system which allows everybody access to credit while ensuring excellent repayment - I can give you a guarantee that poverty will not last long.