Archive
Every quote and its note, newest first.
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A Habit of Building
“What do the YC partners look for? It's surprisingly simple. They want people who are good at building things and have a habit of doing it.”
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The Safe Pick
“Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.”
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Who Will Vouch for You
“You need to create a chain of trust. You can't just message people on LinkedIn and say, 'Come and join me.' … you need to have people around you who can sell you and can be that chain of trust that can validate you.”
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From Two-Pizza Pods to Two-Slice Pods
“Jeff Bezos famously said that if you can't feed your team with two pizzas, the team is too big. That ceiling has dropped again. AI-native product teams are smaller – much smaller – because agents fill what used to require headcount.”
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Find the Bad Feeling
“My goal is to feel bad in the same way that customers feel bad.”
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Built Fast, Built Slow
“Speed is a choice.”
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What the Competitors Didn't Get
“Competing products work at the wrong layer of abstraction and/or force the user to constantly think and do things.”
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Prove Yourself Wrong
“'Strong opinions weakly held' is often a useful default perspective to adopt in the face of any issue fraught with high levels of uncertainty…”
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The Story Founders Leave Out
“Successful entrepreneurs rarely tell the story of the first few months where they battled to find a good idea. In reality, most top founders go through a rigorous ideation process to come up with the idea we know them for today.”
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Knowing What You're Talking About
“People may have some impression of you being young when you come in, but if you know a lot about what you're talking about, they take you seriously.”
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Fog of War
“You'll get a hundred pieces of feedback, most of them conflicting, and ninety of them probably wrong. As an entrepreneur, you have to be willing to make decisions, and you can't be a perfectionist.”
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Once People Know Your Name
“It's not what you know; it's your credibility. And once you build credibility, and people know your name, it's a lot easier.”
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They Know More Games
“You can't make a good deal with a bad person. Just forget it.”
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Belief to the Contrary
“Do not hire chronically negative people. They do not fit what an early-stage startup needs—the rest of the world will be predicting your demise every day, and the company needs to be united internally in its belief to the contrary.”
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Both Infectious
“Good and bad people are both infectious, and if you start with mediocre people, the average does not usually trend up. Companies that start off with mediocre early employees almost never recover.”
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Hire Someone You Would Work For
“I will only hire someone to work directly for me if I would work for that person.”
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Worth Capturing
“The more golden the goose, the greater the temptation to butcher it. Success makes you a target. It makes you something worth capturing.”
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Proof of Character
“That $1.50 hot dog [at Costco] is proof of character.”
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What Won't Change
“We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details.”
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A Great PM Is an Oxymoron
“A lot of the great PMs that I've worked with really just always have some form of long-term thinking in their mind… but yet on a day-to-day basis, their bias for action is just borderline annoying.”
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As If You Had Collaborated
“One is, it has this ideological culture that everyone understands why they are doing what they're doing. And then it has a very, very clear organizational structure of who can be trusted with which decision.”
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Follow the Hoops
“One of the greatest gifts is when people use your product in a way that you didn't expect or didn't ordain because they're going through extra hoops to do what they want to do with the product.”
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All New Fails
“All new fails. It doesn't mean you don't do new. Of course not. It means you take a different approach to new, which is you can't try one new idea because it's going to fail.”
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Ruthless Prioritization
“If a museum has all of their collection on the walls, then the curator hasn't done anything.”
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Your Instincts Are How You Win
“After decades of building products, I've learned that your instinct is probably right, but your idea is probably wrong. And that gap between the two is where most founders lose.”
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The Last Will Be First
“Moving first is a tactic, not a goal. … It's much better to be the last mover—that is, to make the last great development in a specific market and enjoy years or even decades of monopoly profits.”
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Rewarded, Promoted, or Let Go
“The actual company values, as opposed to the nice-sounding values, are shown by who gets rewarded, promoted, or let go.”
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A Crowded Market Is a Good Sign
“A crowded market is actually a good sign, because it means both that there's demand and that none of the existing solutions are good enough.”
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Clarity Sells
“If you confuse, you'll lose.”
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The Simpler the Story
“Humans think in stories rather than in facts, numbers or equations, and the simpler the story, the better.”
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The Story Drives the Build
“Every product should have a story, a narrative that explains why it needs to exist and how it will solve your customer's problems.”
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Also a Storyteller
“Today, if you want to succeed as an entrepreneur, you also have to be a storyteller.”
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Raise Money When You Can
“Raise money when you can, not when you need to.”
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You Can Feel It
“And you can always feel product/market fit when it's happening. The customers are buying the product just as fast as you can make it—or usage is growing just as fast as you can add more servers.”
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Circle of Competence
“You have to figure out what your own aptitudes are. If you play games where other people have the aptitudes and you don't, you're going to lose. … And you've got to play within your own circle of competence.”
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Intense Interest
“Intense interest in any subject is indispensable if you're really going to excel in it. I could force myself to be fairly good in a lot of things, but I couldn't excel in anything in which I didn't have an intense interest.”
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Everyone Is the Chief Engineer
“Everyone is the chief engineer … Everyone must understand how, broadly speaking, all the systems in the vehicle work. And so that, so you don't have subsystem optimization …”
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Product Errors Reflect the Organizational Errors
“The product errors reflect the organizational errors.”
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Develop Disagreement
“I take it we are all in complete agreement on the decision here… I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until our next meeting to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain some understanding of what the decision is all about.”
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The GM Nod
“Everyone nods in agreement to a proposed plan of action, but then leaves the room and does nothing.”
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The Craftsmanship in Between
“John Sculley got a very serious disease. And that disease, I've seen other people get it too, it's the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90 percent of the work… there's just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product.”
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Dynamic Range
“Most things in life, the dynamic range between average and the best is at most two to one… In software, and it used to be the case in hardware too, the difference between average and the best is fifty to one, maybe a hundred to one.”
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Great Artists Steal
“Picasso had a saying. He said, 'Good artists copy. Great artists steal.' And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”
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Saying No to the Good Ones
“What focus means is saying no to something that you, with every bone in your body, you think is a phenomenal idea, and you wake up thinking about it, but you say no to it because you're focusing on something else.”
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Removing the Fuel
“Radical transparency is critical to having an idea meritocracy because it shows what's actually happening without spin and prevents people from maneuvering politically behind each others' backs.”
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Politics Is a Symptom
“Politics is when people choose their words and actions based on how they want others to react rather than based on what they really think.”
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Could Nikola Tesla Get an Interview?
“If Nikola Tesla was alive today, could he get an interview? And if not, we're doing something wrong.”
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Most Of The Solution
“Hire great people…this is 90% of the solution as hiring wrong can cost you so much.”
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What You Do Every Day
“What is it you do to practice every day?”
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Talent Versus Personality
“The biggest mistake, in general, I've made is to put too much of a weighting on someone's talent and not enough on their personality. … It actually matters whether someone has a good heart, it really does. I've made the mistake of thinking sometimes it's just about the brain.”
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Curiosity Runs All Four Steps
“Curiosity is the key to all four steps in doing great work.”
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The Little Details
“Tell me about some of the most difficult problems you worked on and how you solved them.”
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A Project of Your Own
“If you do manage to do great work one day, it will probably be on a project of your own.”
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Excessively Curious
“What are you excessively curious about — curious to a degree that would bore most other people?”
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Real Artists Ship
“Real Artists Ship.”
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We Are All in the Same Boat
“Managers should work hard to ensure that they are not creating silos within the company that create an 'us vs. them' mentality, or impede communication in any way.”
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Feelings Set the Direction
“At their best, feelings point us in the proper direction, take us to the appropriate place in a decision-making space, where we may put the instruments of logic to good use.”
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Management by Values
“Recruiting is the most important thing that you do. Finding the right people—that's half the battle.”
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Spend a Quarter of Your Time on It
“Spend more time recruiting.”
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Tenure Isn't Judgment
“Judgment is the core, the nucleus, of leadership. With good judgment, little else matters. Without it, nothing else matters.”
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Time Served
“When people have spent a lifetime in an industry they tend to think that they have acquired 30 years of experience when in fact they probably acquired the first three years 10 times over.”
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One Year Repeated Ten Times
“Experience alone is not necessarily the best teacher; it is the slowest, and very likely the most expensive. Ten years of experience is not too valuable if it is one year of experience repeated 10 times.”
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Wisdom Is an Input, Not an Output
“The greatest wisdom not applied to action and behavior is meaningless data.”
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Information for Action
“The purpose of information is not knowledge. It is being able to take the right action.”
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Wise People Read
“In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn't read all the time—none, zero.”
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Look for Problems You Have
“The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It's to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself.”
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Closer to the Cult End
“The best startups might be considered slightly less extreme kinds of cults. The biggest difference is that cults tend to be fanatically wrong about something important. People at a successful startup are fanatically right about something those outside it have missed.”
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Ideas Need Resistance
“Ideas get developed in the process of explaining them to the right kind of person. You need that resistance, just as a carver needs the resistance of the wood.”
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Market Wins
“When a great team meets a lousy market, market wins. When a lousy team meets a great market, market wins.”
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Blueprint or Question
“Treating a startup idea as a question changes what you're looking for. If an idea is a blueprint, it has to be right. But if it's a question, it can be wrong, so long as it's wrong in a way that leads to more ideas.”
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Solutions Are Disposable
“Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution”
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Judgment Is the Asset
“In an age of infinite leverage, judgment becomes the most important skill.”
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Decisions and Luck
“There are exactly two things that determine how our lives turn out: the quality of our decisions and luck.”
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The Replacement CEO
“If we got kicked out and the board brought in a new CEO, what do you think he would do? … Why shouldn't you and I walk out the door, come back and do it ourselves?”
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Compliance Without Belief
“If you simply bark out orders, you get malicious obedience—they'll build exactly what you want and make sure it doesn't work.”
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The Translation Is the Work
“There are a lot of good ideas. Translating a good idea into a great product is unbelievably hard.”
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Forget, Not Deprioritize
“My view is that there are only a handful of things that are really important, and you devote all of your time to those things and forget everything else.”
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Learn From Them
“I don't know if consumers know what they want. But we can learn from them.”
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Love or Hate
“For me, a well-designed product is one you fall in love with. Or you hate. It may be polarizing, but it has to provoke a real reaction.”
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Healthy Fear and Conviction
“Every morning you've got to wake up with a healthy fear that the world is changing, and a conviction that, to win, you have to change faster and be more agile than anyone else.”
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Customers Can't Predict Themselves
“I do not believe that any amount of market research could have told us that the Sony Walkman would be successful, not to say a sensational hit that would spawn many imitators.”
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Growth and Comfort Don't Coexist
“Growth and comfort don't coexist. That's true for people, for companies, for nations.”
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Fear Invites Wrong Figures
“Fear invites wrong figures. Bearers of bad news fare badly. To keep his job, anyone may present to his boss only good news.”
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Why The Initial Plan Doesn't Matter
“A startup's initial business plan doesn't matter that much, because it is very hard to determine up front exactly what combination of product and market will result in success.”
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Roadmaps as Root Cause
“Typical roadmaps are the root cause of most waste and failed efforts in product organizations.”
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Planning Is Guessing
“Planning is guessing.”
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Plans Are Guesses
“Working without a plan may seem scary. But blindly following a plan that has no relationship with reality is even scarier.”
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Validate on Real Users
“One of the most common traps in product is to believe that we can anticipate our customer's actual response to our products.”
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Rule 13
“When placed in command, take charge.”
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Two Tests for Specific Knowledge
“Building specific knowledge will feel like play to you but will look like work to others.”
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Invert, Always Invert
“The great algebraist, Jacobi… was known for his constant repetition of one phrase: 'Invert, always invert.'”
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Let Chaos Reign, Then Rein in Chaos
“…you needed to let chaos reign in order to explore your alternatives… you must rein in chaos.”
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“If you read any management textbook, it says 'don't hire the divas' … But the people who are the divas … are the ones who will drive the culture and company to excellence … they drive people hard, they're controversial, and they care passionately.”
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Escalate True Misalignment
“Recognize true misalignment issues early and escalate them immediately. … No amount of discussion, no number of meetings will resolve that deep misalignment. Without escalation, the default dispute resolution mechanism for this scenario is exhaustion. Whoever has more stamina carries the decision.”
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B Players
“Mediocrity is the silent killer. Organizations are not getting killed by their C players… The people who kill organizations are your B players.”
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Jobs to Be Done
“When people find themselves needing to get a job done, they essentially hire products to do that job for them.”
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Task-Relevant Maturity
“How often you monitor should not be based on what you believe your subordinate can do in general, but on his experience with a specific task and his prior performance with it—his task-relevant maturity…”
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Without Seeing the Process, No Improvement
“If people do not see the process, they can not improve it.”
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You Cannot Install Quality Control
“'We installed quality control.' No. You can install a new desk, or a new carpet, or a new dean, but not quality control. Anyone that proposes to 'install quality control' unfortunately has little knowledge about quality control.”
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Reasoning From First Principles
“I tend to approach things from a physics framework. And physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy.”
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Walk Out of the Meeting
“Excessive meetings are the blight of big companies and almost always get worse over time.… Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you aren't adding value.”
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Tell Engineers the Problem, Not the Features
“If you ever tell an engineer at Intuit which features you want, I'm going to throw you out on the street.”
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The First Hundred Are Referrals
“Most great companies in tech have been built by personal referrals for the first at least 100 employees and often many more.”
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Both Halves
“…We restructured our force from the ground up on principles of extremely transparent information sharing (what we call 'shared consciousness') and decentralized decision-making authority ('empowered execution').”
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Why Knowledge Workers Manage Themselves
“Knowledge workers have to manage themselves. They have to have autonomy.”
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Emergent Architecture
“The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.”
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A Small-Market Monopoly First
“You have to find a small market in which you can get a monopoly and then quickly expand.”
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Bucket, Not Thimble
“Big opportunities come infrequently. When it's raining gold, reach for a bucket, not a thimble.”
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Posteriorities
“…The job is, however, not to set priorities. That is easy. Everybody can do it. The reason why so few executives concentrate is the difficulty of setting 'posteriorities'—that is, deciding what tasks not to tackle—and of sticking to the decision.”
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Abandon Yesterday to Create Tomorrow
“If leaders are unable to slough off yesterday, to abandon yesterday, they simply will not be able to create tomorrow.”
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On Trial for Its Life
“The change leader puts every product, every service, every process, every market, every distribution channel, every customer and end-use, on trial for its life… The question has to be asked—and asked seriously—'If we did not do this already, would we, knowing what we now know, go into it?'”
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Stop Doing Lists
“Those who built the good-to-great companies… made as much use of 'stop doing' lists as 'to do' lists.”
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The Too Hard Pile
“I have a way of handling a lot of problems – I put them on what I call my 'too hard pile' and I just leave them there. I'm not trying to succeed in my 'too hard' pile.”
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Hell Yeah or No
“If you're not saying 'HELL YEAH!' about something, say no.”
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Barksdaleism
“If we have data, let's look at data. If all we have are opinions, let's go with mine.”
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Embrace Bad News
“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”
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Designing for Candor
“A hallmark of a healthy creative culture is that its people feel free to share ideas, opinions, and criticisms. Lack of candor, if unchecked, ultimately leads to dysfunctional environments.”
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Some Things Just Take Time
“No matter how great the talent or effort, some things just take time: you can't produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant.”
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Disagree and Commit
“…use the phrase 'disagree and commit.' This phrase will save a lot of time.”
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The Work Is in the Thinking
“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.”
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Barrels and Ammunition
“Most people, most great people even, are actually ammunition. But what you need in your company are barrels… A barrel… can take an idea from conception all the way through shipping and bring people with them.”
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Systems Set the Floor
“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”
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In That Order
“People, ideas, hardware—in that order.”
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Take the Experience First
“In the business world, everyone is paid in two coins: cash and experience. Take the experience first; the cash will come later.”
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Can't or Won't
“When a person is not doing his job, there can only be two reasons for it. The person either can't do it or won't do it; he is either not capable or not motivated.”
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The Hock Principle
“Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex and intelligent behavior. Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple and stupid behavior.”
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Innovation, Not Tradition
“Our industry does not respect tradition — it only respects innovation.”
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The Customer Is the Only Boss
“There is only one boss… It's the customer! … the customer can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, and he can do it simply by spending his money somewhere else.”
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The Mantra Behind OKRs
“Ideas are easy. Execution is everything.”
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Business Plans Versus Business Models
“No business plan survives first contact with customers.”
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Bring Me Problems
“Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them.”
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All Happy Companies Are Different
“All happy companies are different: Each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: They failed to escape competition.”
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Judgment Over Ideas
“If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something better.”
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A Few Who Love You, Not a Lot Ambivalent
“Better to make a few users love you than a lot ambivalent.”
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Choosing What Not To Do
“The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.”
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The Power of Incentives
“Never, ever, think about something else when you should be thinking about the power of incentives.”
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Direction Over Force
“Picking the direction you're heading in for every decision is far, far more important than how much force you apply.”
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WHO Over WHAT
“People often make the mistake of focusing on what should be done while neglecting the more important question of who should be given the responsibility for determining what should be done. That's backward.”
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Fix Mistakes Fast, Not Too Fast
“Fix your mistakes fast… but not too fast. If you are super-scrupulous about your hiring process, you'll still have maybe a 70% success rate of a new person really working out—if you're lucky.”
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Talent Density
“If you have a team of five stunning employees and two adequate ones, the adequate ones will sap managers' energy… reduce the quality of group discussions… drive staff who seek excellence to quit, and show the team you accept mediocrity, thus multiplying the problem.”
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Missionaries vs. Mercenaries
“'We need teams of missionaries, not teams of mercenaries.' Mercenaries build whatever they're told to build. Missionaries are true believers in the vision and are committed to solving problems for their customers.”
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Strategic Inflection Points
“Only the paranoid survive.”
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When in Doubt, Don't Hire
“When in doubt, don't hire—keep looking.”
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Principles of Senior Hiring
“The best way to evaluate someone is to work with them.”
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Hire for Slope
“Hire for slope, not y-intercept.”
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Hire For the Next Role, Not This One
“Remember that in a startup, anyone you hire is likely to be doing a new job in three to six months. Smart and effective people are adaptable.”
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Manage the Conditions
“You can't manage creativity—you can only manage for creativity.”
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Iron Law of Bureaucracy
“In any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. ... The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization...”
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What You Ignore Becomes the Culture
“If you see something off-culture and ignore it, you've created a new culture.”
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Automate Last
“Automate. That comes last. The big mistake in Nevada and at Fremont was that I began by trying to automate every step. We should have waited until all the requirements had been questioned, parts and processes deleted, and the bugs were shaken out.”
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If A Timeline Is Long
“If a timeline is long, it's wrong.”
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Set Your Culture on Purpose
“If you don't methodically set your culture, then two-thirds of it will end up being accidental, and the rest will be a mistake.”
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Great Things, First Time
“I'm a firm believer that most people who do great things are doing them for the first time.”
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PhDs and Shipping
“PhDs are the hardest people to motivate to ship commercially viable products—with rare exception.”
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Hire for Strength, Not Lack of Weakness
“I'd learned the hard way that when hiring executives, one should follow Colin Powell's instructions and hire for strength rather than lack of weakness.”
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Raise the Average
“During our hiring meetings, we ask people to consider three questions before making a decision: Will you admire this person?… Will this person raise the average level of effectiveness of the group they're entering?… Along what dimension might this person be a superstar?”
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Aligning the Vectors
“If people were negative, they were not in the next meeting… A company is a bunch of vectors. Each person is a vector, and they need to point in the direction that you want to go. Bureaucracy and office politics and low morale -- they're almost random vectors. He was always about making all the vectors… pointing in the right direction.”
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Release Ideas at the Rate the Organization Can Accept
“You have to release the work at the right rate so that the organization can accept it.”
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Run by Ideas
“You have to be run by ideas, not hierarchy. The best ideas have to win, otherwise good people don't stay.”
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Intelligence Above a Threshold, Determination Above That
“But as long as you're over a certain threshold of intelligence, what matters most is determination.”
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Doing the Wrong Thing Well
“There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.”
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Stunning Colleagues
“A Great Workplace Is Stunning Colleagues”
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ABCD
“Always Be Connecting Dots”
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People Over Process
“It was not obvious at the time, even to me, but we had one thing that Blockbuster did not: a culture that valued people over process, emphasized innovation over efficiency, and had very few controls.”
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Urgency Is the Absence of Complacency, Not Panic
“A higher rate of urgency does not imply ever-present panic, anxiety, or fear. It means a state in which complacency is virtually absent.”
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Leadership Is Preparing for Change
“They don't make plans; they don't solve problems; they don't even organize people. What leaders really do is prepare organizations for change and help them cope as they struggle through it.”
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Optimizing the Thing That Shouldn't Exist
“Possibly the most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize a thing that should not exist.”
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Anecdotes Beat the Dashboard
“When the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. It's usually not that the data is being miscollected. It's usually that you're not measuring the right thing.”
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Guided, Taught, Led
“The moment you feel the need to tightly manage someone, you've made a hiring mistake. The best people don't need to be managed. Guided, taught, led—yes. But not tightly managed.”
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Lazy and Dumb
“We look for three things when we hire people. We look for intelligence, we look for initiative or energy, and we look for integrity. And if they don't have the latter, the first two will kill you…”
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The Right People
“People are not your most important asset. The right people are.”
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People First, Then Product, Then Profits
“In the end, all business operations can be reduced to three words: people, product, and profits. People come first. Unless you've got a good team, you can't do much with the other two.”
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No Hierarchy of Ideas
“Apple was a very bottom-up company when it came to a lot of its great ideas. We hired truly great people and gave them the room to do great work. A lot of companies... hire people to tell them what to do. We hire people to tell us what to do.”
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Skills Can Be Taught
“Skills can be taught. Character you either have or don't have.”
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Hiring and Developing
“I am convinced that nothing we do is more important than hiring and developing people. At the end of the day you bet on people, not on strategies.”
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The Handshake Test
“[There are] things that we can't teach... smile and attitude has to come with someone to the interview and the job.”
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Word of Mouth Beats Advertising
“If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.”
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Why the Long Horizon
“I don't think that you can invent on behalf of customers unless you're willing to think long-term, because a lot of invention doesn't work. If you're going to invent, it means you're going to experiment, and if you're going to experiment, you're going to fail, and if you're going to fail, you have to think long term.”
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Day 1 Vitality
“There are many ways to center a business. You can be competitor focused, you can be product focused… But in my view, obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of Day 1 vitality.”
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Mistaking the Present for the Future
“They were mistaking the present for the future. It's the worst mistake a tech company can make.”
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The Next Bill Gates Won't Build an Operating System
“Every moment in business happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won't make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won't create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren't learning from them.”
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The Biggest Risk Is Not Taking Any Risk
“In a world that's changing so quickly, the biggest risk you can take is not taking any risk.”
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Assume Positive Intent
“I learned to always assume positive intent... When you assume negative intent, you're angry. If you take away that anger and assume positive intent, you will be amazed.”
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Launched Too Late
“If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late.”
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Planning, Not Plans
“Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.”
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Price Has to Be the Starting Point
“No asset is so good that it can't become a bad investment if bought at too high a price.”
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Saying No
“It [Apple's innovation] comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don't get on the wrong track or try to do too much. We're always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it's only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.”
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The Twenty-Slot Punch Card
“I could improve your ultimate financial welfare by giving you a ticket with only 20 slots in it so that you had 20 punches—representing all the investments that you got to make in a lifetime. And once you'd punched through the card, you couldn't make any more investments at all.”
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Competing With One PM
“When a startup is competing against a large competitor, they aren't competing with the entire company, they are likely competing with some PM focused on internal politics/career progression. With this framing, it shouldn't be surprising to see startups win as often as they do.”
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The Story Is the Strategy
“A company without a story is usually a company without a strategy... In good companies, the story and the strategy are the same thing.”
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Positive Energy and Positive Results
“Positive energy and positive people create positive results.”
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Hire Slow, Fire Fast
“Hire Slow, Fire Fast”
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Two-Way Doors
“Some decisions are consequential and irreversible… one-way doors… these decisions must be made methodically, carefully, slowly… But most decisions aren't like that – they are changeable, reversible – they're two-way doors… Type 2 decisions can and should be made quickly…”
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Decisions at 70%
“…most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you're probably being slow.”
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No Credit for Predicting Rain
“As a leader, you don't get any credit for predicting the rain. You only get credit for building the ark.”
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Is Anybody Listening?
“The great enemy of communication, we find, is the illusion of it.”
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But to Survive, We Must Learn
“Learning is not compulsory; it's voluntary. Improvement is not compulsory; it's voluntary. But to survive, we must learn.”
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Without Theory, There Is No Learning
“Experience teaches nothing. In fact there is no experience to record without theory… Without theory there is no learning… And that is their downfall. People copy examples and then they wonder what is the trouble. They look at examples and without theory they learn nothing.”
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Schedule Your Priorities
“The key is not to prioritize what's on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.”