Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
When, within our souls and psyches we are made aware of a safe but insistent drum beat, repeated like butterfly wings in motion, we sense the message...that our inner self has begun its search for freedom.
I get everything that satisfies my soul from bringing together objects that are in the world, manipulating them, working with spatial arrangements, and having things presented in the way I want to see them.
Many consumer Internet business executives are loyalists of the Lifetime Value model, often referred to as the LTV model or formula. Lifetime value is the net present value of the profit stream of a customer.
I'm a living testament to the value of immigration. I escaped a civil war, and I came to Canada as a refugee, and they gave my family protection. I did my best to pay that country back, and I think I did that.
If you choose a market that already exists, say, networking equipment, you have to compete with an established company like Cisco. Even if your product is marginally better, Cisco can fudge it and outsell you.
Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr are all 'User First, Brands Second' services. The brands are all over these services now. But for the most part, these services didn't do much to bring them. The engaged users did.
All these social media sites allow us to confuse truth and popularity. That has to be fixed. Because every normal citizen has a right to know what is factual versus what is amplified by good actors or bad actors.
I've made my best personal investments when I've been a user of the product. Like Apple. The epiphany for me came when I purchased my fifth iPod and I hadn't unwrapped my fourth. It was still in the plastic case.
Raising the minimum wage is very efficient. Everybody's on the same playing field, it's a very simple rule, it doesn't require a lot of administration, you don't have to negotiate anything. It just is what it is.
It's not easy for an entrepreneur to find the time to blog. But for those who do it, it is a great tool to communicate with the various stakeholders in their business and build a reputation for thought leadership.
If low taxes were the way that people like me created wealth, then we'd be starting our companies in the Congo or Somalia or Afghanistan, but we're not. We come to places where there are lots and lots of customers.
I believe the mobile OS market will play out very similarly to Windows and Macintosh, with Android in the role of Windows. And so if you want to be in front of the largest number of users, you need to be on Android.
I believe the mobile OS market will play out very similarly to Windows and Macintosh, with Android in the role of Windows. And so, if you want to be in front of the largest number of users, you need to be on Android.
I'm not saying M.B.A.s can't be great entrepreneurs. They can. But you don't need a degree to figure out it's costing you $5,000 per month to run your business, so you need $30,000 to keep it going for six more months.
My undergraduate degree was in history, and I wish I had been smart enough to really excel at maths, physics, chemistry or biology because... the voyagers and adventurers and real contributors - that's where they come from.
They've found a way to privately, or within a small family group, share expressions, or other images, drawings, and then gain access to some of the world's great expressions and images and make them real, make them tangible.
A captivating moment was when I realized that people, including myself, were not saying, “I just bought an item on eBay.” They were saying, “I just won an item on eBay.” It was the thrill of the hunt. I bought a car on eBay.
A captivating moment was when I realized that people, including myself, were not saying, 'I just bought an item on eBay.' They were saying, 'I just won an item on eBay.' It was the thrill of the hunt. I bought a car on eBay.
I think there are a lot of companies that are staying private longer. Much more of their growth is happening while they are on the private side. So their valuations are hitting $1 billion while they are still private more often.
My wife calls me the Imelda Marcos of books. As soon as a book enters our home it is guaranteed a permanent place in our lives. Because I have never been able to part with even one, they have gradually accumulated like sediment.
Internet and mobile product development cycles are measured in months, not years. And the capital required to get a product built and into the market is less than $1 million. And the returns, when things work out, can be enormous.
One of the things that I think makes me successful is the way in which I collaborate with others. In my opinion, nothing great is ever the product of one mind. It's always a consequence of some sort of self-critical collaboration.
I grew up believing that one person could make a difference. In Indiana, you saw that with basketball. The small town could beat the big town, like in the movie Hoosiers. That is one of the things that attracts me to entrepreneurs.
It's obviously unfair to paint with a broad brush here, but the germ of an idea for a breakthrough in technology doesn't come out of a business school curriculum. It comes out of a laboratory or a math lecture or a physics tutorial.
I grew up believing that one person could make a difference. In Indiana, you saw that with basketball. The small town could beat the big town, like in the movie 'Hoosiers.' That is one of the things that attracts me to entrepreneurs.
Today we live in a world now where it is easy to confuse truth and popularity. And you can use money to amplify whatever you believe and get people to believe what is popular is now truthful. And what is not popular may not be truthful.
Government does create prosperity and growth by creating the conditions that allow both entrepreneurs and their customers to thrive; balancing the power of capitalists like me and workers isn't bad for capitalism - it's essential to it.
None of us are going to fix governance; it may just be beyond repair. But you can fix capitalism. And the reason you can fix capitalism - It is inherently numerical, and as a result, it is inherently objective. It can be done objectively.
I think the idea that giant profitable corporations should pay their workers enough so that they don't need food stamps - since when is that left wing? How did that become "leftie?" That doesn't seem leftie to me. That seems common sense.
I think the idea that giant profitable corporations should pay their workers enough so that they don't need food stamps - since when is that left-wing? How did that become 'leftie?' That doesn't seem leftie to me. That seems common sense.
You meet with a CEO or founder. You talk about sales, engineering, product management and give some ideas or suggestions. And the founder quickly understands that you really can help them both operationally and from a strategic standpoint.
All you need do is listen to very smart people and sift out the ideas that are unworthy or implausible, and I wouldn't pretend for a moment that I hadn't made lots of mistakes and there are companies, perhaps, that we had been investors in.
The point of Silicon Valley, at least when I moved here, was we're all trying to do stuff, and none of us quite felt like we fit in anywhere else. But we were all trying to do good things. And the money was just the byproduct of good things.
We need new medical approaches to preventing and/or curing disease. We need new scientific approaches to generating, storing, and being more efficient with energy. Maybe we need more space exploration. Maybe we need more undersea exploration.
I think that it will be the mobile technologies, both from the enterprise and the consumer side, where super unicorns will come from. I still believe that social networking in combination with mobile will create opportunities for super unicorns.
Middle-out economics rejects the old misconception that an economy is a perfectly efficient, mechanistic system and embraces the much more accurate idea of an economy as a complex ecosystem made up of real people who are dependent on one another.
I've found that a lot of successful poker players grew up poor. And I'm convinced that poor people have a risk tolerance that rich people don't have because poor people fundamentally don't value money that much because they're used to not having it.
It does seem really hard to get consumers to do the right thing. It is stupid that we use two tons of steel, glass, and plastic to haul our sorry selves to the shopping mall. It's stupid that we put water in plastic bottles in Fiji and ship it here.
We have co-opted seed funds. You know, Y Combinator, that was completely our money. We have secret handshakes with a whole bunch of people. Very dangerous, because word gets out that so-and-so's money is Sequoia's money, that would not be a good thing.
The innovation industries are rapidly going global. In five years, more than 50% of venture capital returns will come from markets outside the United States, including China, India, Brazil, and Australia, and AlwaysOn events are on top of these trends.
We plutocrats need to get this trickle-down economics thing behind us: this idea that the better we do, the better everyone else will do. It's not true. How could it be? I earn 1,000 times the median wage, but I do not buy 1,000 times as much stuff, do I?
Tech innovation is something societies have to pursue as vigorously as they can. We have to innovate civically and socially at the same rate; otherwise, you create unfortunate disruptions, and that's where you have people opposing technological innovations.
All human endeavor, all human civilization, is the act of solving collective action problems. Should we put out our own fires, or should we have a fire department? Should we build roads, or should we hack our way through the woods from one factory to another?
There's a final exam in venture every four to six years. The scary thing is you need to get an 'A' in every discipline. You need to be on generational planning, need to be on great deal flow, need be on great outcomes, you need to be on great company building.
Once America's CEOs get back to the business of growing their companies rather than growing their share prices, shareholder value will take care of itself, and all Americans will share in the higher wages and other benefits of a renewed era of economic growth.
The thing about a real economy is that it actually is like the game of Monopoly in the sense that when one person has all the money, the game is over. And in a game of Monopoly, of course, that's quite charming, but in a real economy, it's much more problematic.
You see, we capitalists will never actually ask you to work overtime. I don't even track your hours. I just make it clear that I trust you to get your job done in the time allotted. And then I hand you twice as much work as you can reasonably do in a 40-hour week.
Most people believe, mistakenly, that wealth in a human society has something to do with money, but that's not true. Money is simply a medium of exchange. Prosperity in a human society is the accumulation of solutions to human problems that we create for ourselves.
The collision of mobile and social platforms and the need to build these companies from the ground up - whether it's a game, a healthcare application, an education application - building these from the ground up is what allows entrepreneurial activity to be unleashed.
People want to think of economics as a natural science, like physics, with the comforting reliability of simple-to-understand theories like F=MA. Unfortunately, it isn't. Economics is a social science, and the so-called theories are really social and moral constructs.