Archive

Sachin Agarwal

• Stress at a startup, and the excitement that pays for it

Sam Altman

• A rough start is normal, which is different from meaningful

Marco Arment

• People pay to keep what they like alive
• The business model Instapaper runs on

Michael Arrington

• Building for yourself is a good start and a risky finish
• Research does not make products bland; bad questions do

Jeff Atwood

• Explaining something to a peer shows what you do not know
• What A/B testing can find, and the hill it cannot see past

Micah Baldwin

• The decision takes a minute; the consequences take a year
• Faith without fear is how startups begin and how some end

Jim Barksdale

• Keeping the main thing the main thing is the easy half

Jen Bekman

• Let the bestsellers pay for the long shots

Scott Belsky

• Execution decides, and sometimes the idea decides first
• Looking naive is a smaller risk than hedging every idea

Marc Benioff

• Two tests for a path: whether it is fun, and whether it is hard
• A market with one company in it is a lonely place to sell
• More features, less weight

Kyle Bragger

• A mentor from the right field beats a famous one from the wrong field
• Ship it, iterate hard, and admit the outcome is a hope

Richard Branson

• Give people a job slightly bigger than the one they expected

Jim Breyer

• A founding team, and the people it can attract

Paul Buchheit

• A record with no failures is a warning sign

Warren Buffett

• Counting heads is not the same as thinking

Brad Burnham

• Start small and let demand set the direction

Jason Calacanis

• Outcomes get remembered; methods get checked later
• Built in the downturn, collected in the recovery

Ryan Carson

• A four-day week as a small company's advantage
• User experience decays unless someone keeps working on it

Steve Case

• Looking for the reasons it could work, without ignoring the odds
• What risk-taking looks like in an actual company

Jean-David Chamboredon

• Pacing a startup like a long race

Billy Chasen

• Easy to explain and still hard to understand

Brian Chesky

• The thousand days before Airbnb looked sudden
• Doing things by hand to find out what the product should do

Gary Chou

• A product can change course; its users may not follow

Jeff Clavier

• Mistakes are part of the job; some of them are still failures

Jon Yongfook Cockle

• Launch small, listen closely, then go again

David Cohen

• Caring about the work and the customer, and what it cannot supply
• Traction attracts investors, but not every good product has the kind they want

Jason Cohen

• A name matters less than what the company does

Jim Collins

• Past three priorities, the word stops meaning anything
• Decline usually starts at home
• When good enough gets in the way, and when it should not
• Simple answers come at the end of the thinking

Ron Conway

• Building the team from the first day
• No plan, no MBA, and what the line leaves out

Dennis Crowley

• When people say it won't work, build enough to find out
• Waiting for an engineer, then learning to build
• Doing what you love, and waiting for the rest to arrive
• Build the rough version the technology allows today

Mark Cuban

• Loving the work as the fallback prize
• Rejection as a count, not a verdict
• Everyone plans to be special; the work decides
• Using the fear of failure as fuel without letting it steer

Leah Culver

• Build the core idea, test it, and only then add to it

Bart Decrem

• Letting a company find out what it is

Michael Dell

• Michael Dell's retail detour and what it taught him
• Anyone could sell computers by mail. Few could do it well

Walt Disney

• Disney's early years, and when talking first is the right move

Chris Dixon

• Daily rejection as a sign the goals are big enough

John Doerr

• Where the best deals are, conflicts of interest come along
• Funding the future is a different job from inventing it
• The team is the hardest part, and the market can still overrule it

Jack Dorsey

• Luck arrives unannounced; noticing it is the skill
• Perfect details, and fewer of them

Esther Dyson

• Customer money buys time without selling any of the company
• Start with the task, then choose the tool

Thomas Edison

• Edison's vote recorder and the test of a sale
• An idea earns its value when someone uses it

Roger Ehrenberg

• After a failure, the next choice is still open

Larry Ellison

• Confidence in the voice, accuracy in the facts
• Being called crazy is common, and it proves nothing
• Describing the product you want is not the same as having it
• Work on the future product as if it already exists

Noah Everett

• Working alone, the day starts with one choice

Caterina Fake

• Choosing the right work, and how Flickr found it
• No company is one person's work
• Staying a beginner on purpose

Brad Feld

• Love for the work is fuel, and it has to be the right kind

Henry Ford

• School teaches last year; the market asks about next year
• Bring a remedy along with the complaint

Ryan Freitas

• The work itself, not the talk about it
• Nobody grades the list, only what came off it

Jason Fried

• Every job looks easy from the outside
• The cheap yes and the expensive one that follows
• Interruption and the long stretch that real work needs

Spencer Fry

• Building on land someone else owns
• The job behind the founder label is keeping the company alive

Todd Garland

• Tell people the idea, then read their doubt carefully

Gordon Gekko

• Popularity and results are different things, as Gekko knew

Seth Godin

• Failing at something beats never trying it, most of the time
• How a rival can make the sale easier
• Showing up on schedule, especially on the bad days
• Winning the old game faster is still playing the old game
• Pick which one to give up: easy or certain
• Acting brilliant is the slow road to being seen as brilliant

Chuck Gordon

• Assume the plan is wrong, then find out cheaply

Paul Graham

• Build what you would use today
• Simplicity as a way of finding the real problem
• The complaint that says the price is right
• Punches you can see coming beat the slow kind

Dan Greenberg

• Stay committed to the problem, stay loose about the answer

Forrest Gump

• Life as a box of chocolates, and the card inside the lid

Kevin Hale

• Deciding without taking it personally

Omar Hamoui

• A company defined by its rival borrows the rival's shape
• Why incumbents rarely crush the small rival, and how they sometimes do

David Heinemeier Hansson

• Working on the best idea, and finishing the good one first
• Running out of cash is honest, but late

Scott Heiferman

• Asking a team to care as much as the founder
• Listening to complaints without being run by them

Reid Hoffman

• If the first version doesn't embarrass you, it shipped too late
• Stubborn about the goal, loose about the route
• A good idea still needs a route to its users
• The case for starting in a slump

Ben Horowitz

• Do the job for a while before hiring someone to do it

Drew Houston

• Being right once only counts if the misses were small
• When launching early is risky, learn early instead

Tony Hsieh

• Other people's winnings are no reason to sit at the table
• Experience teaches what theory leaves out, and the reverse
• Pick the table before you play the hand
• Someone at the table is better than you

Arianna Huffington

• What a good partner multiplies, and what a bad one divides
• Fear rarely leaves first, so the work starts with it present
• Fear as something trained down, not wished away
• Screwing up as a normal part of deciding

Chris Hughes

• Your own frustration as a starting point, plus some nerve
• Hearing customers through what they do

Ben Huh

• Creativity as a matter of volume
• Bland is the failure nobody notices
• No master plan is a plan, and it needs limits

Jonathan Ive

• Different is cheap to copy, better is not
• Solve the hard problem and keep the difficulty out of sight

Josh James

• An idea that will not leave you alone says more about you than the market

Magnus Jepson

• After working for yourself, going back is harder than it looks

Steve Jobs

• Pirates, the navy, and who pays for the ship
• Design is how the thing works
• Customers can judge a product, not invent it
• The brick, and the years after it
• Loving the work, and the years it can take to find it
• Richest in the cemetery was never the goal

Rob Kalin

• Recessions are hard on companies and easier on ideas

Ingvar Kamprad

• Leadership as example, and where example runs out
• Mistakes are the price of being awake
• Plans simple enough to change when the world does
• The feeling of being finished is the thing to watch

Justin Kan

• Managing work you know how to do yourself
• The hardest pace a person can keep is the one to aim for

David Karp

• Each new hire adds conversations as well as hands
• An entrepreneur as someone who wants to make a thing
• Every feature keeps sending a bill

Guy Kawasaki

• Ideas are cheap for a reason

Alan Kay

• A ninety percent failure rate belongs in research, not payroll
• Keep the simple path short and the deep path open

Ben Keighran

• One objective at a time, and everyone knows which
• Value goes to whoever makes the change happen

Tom Kelley

• Cheap failures, early and often

Charles F. Kettering

• Facing forward without forgetting what broke
• Progress runs through the change people resist

Joe Kraus

• Keep the optimism and check it against the numbers
• A company built to be sold sells for less
• Put the business model in beta along with the product

Sarah Lacy

• Let the product be famous and keep the founder private
• Starting got cheaper, the company part did not

Edwin Land

• Why real inventions meet resistance
• Creative work needs room to fail, and a reason to stop
• Creativity as the moment an assumption stops
• The hard part is letting go of the old idea

Jessica Livingston

• Founder stories get told from the end, and the middle disappears
• Skepticism comes with anything new, so read it carefully

Michael Lopp

• An idea kept private has not been tested
• Shipped work is the most credible reference a person has

Jack Ma

• Nine rabbits on the ground, and why to chase one
• Profit follows customers and staff, when it follows at all
• Small companies win with attention, not muscle

Dan Martell

• Without interest in customers, a company shrinks into a job

Andrew Mason

• The builder who did not call himself an entrepreneur
• Freedom works for the people who were hired for it

Marissa Mayer

• A product that needs its users to define it has not decided what it is
• User experience measured by usefulness

Greg McAdoo

• Solving problems with ideas before budgets
• Small is a size, doing more with less is a skill

Dave McClure

• Spend the pitch on the problem, unless the problem is obvious
• When design outweighs the technology

Matt Mullenweg

• An idea kept off the market runs short of air
• Choosing the work you love, with the rent already paid

Garrett Murray

• Talking about a project is not starting it

Jake Nickell

• Measuring success in fun, and who else gets counted
• Choose the option the team actually wants to do

Friedrich Nietzsche

• Surviving a hard year does not guarantee a stronger company

Tim O'Reilly

• Owners who answer to no one still benefit from answering to someone
• Money is the fuel for the trip, not the reason for it

Pierre Omidyar

• Passion, hard work and the terms left out
• A system simple enough to run itself, until it grows

Larry Page

• End users first, and the customer who pays second
• Leverage, the respectable kind of laziness

Sean Parker

• What being willing to be poor actually costs

Bob Parsons

• Leaving the comfort zone, and the work that happens inside it
• What gets measured and watched gets better, mostly

Aaron Patzer

• People judge trust by looks, online as much as in person
• Nobody is waiting to steal the idea, with a few exceptions
• Start from a problem you have actually felt
• The objection that became the feature

James Cash Penney

• What a job teaches, and what it leaves out
• A cash-only chain that learned to sell on credit
• A theory is worth what it does in the shop

Jonah Peretti

• Many small bets, and a clear way to pick the winner

Mark Pincus

• Keeping delight in view when the numbers are loud
• Revenue at any cost, and what the cost turned out to be
• Giving people jobs slightly too big for them

Shervin Pishevar

• The people around a founder, chosen on purpose

Tom Preston-Werner

• Most deals worth doing leave both sides ahead
• Choosing the adventure is easier with a floor under it
• Bootstrapping trades an investor's permission for a customer's

Sean Rad

• Splitting the difference between two visions leaves neither

Aza Raskin

• Data describes the present, design proposes something else
• Hiring for what someone knows, not what their papers say
• Each unnecessary question is a small failure of design
• For the person using it, the screen is all there is

Matt Rutledge

• The money left behind by everyone chasing the new thing

Nolan Ryan

• The golden rule as a way to run a team, and its blind spot

Bijan Sabet

• Is the product a text box or a ribbon of commands
• Good hires are what let a founder sleep

Joshua Schachter

• Do the least that gets the job done, and be exact about the job
• The problem people have is not always the one they can name

Howard Schultz

• What a resume leaves out, and what fit can hide

Hiten Shah

• Luck as a matter of attention and attempts

Peter Shankman

• Nothing is viral until other people decide it is

Kathy Sierra

• Why chasing competitors makes a product less competitive

Adam Smith

• Plan for a quarter of your projects to fail
• Focus on the user, and know who pays

Angelo Sotira

• Setting out to change the world usually means changing a small part of it
• Unique is a starting point; better is what keeps people

Gregg Spiridellis

• Good work travels when people can pass it on

Joel Spolsky

• Days spent away from the product, and the ones that pay
• Customers first, competitors a distant second
• Talk to customers, and the rival Stack Overflow was built against
• Fog Creek's marketing experiments, and the release that beat them

Tony Stark

• Running before walking works best with a rebuild budget

Biz Stone

• The ten years behind an overnight success
• What a design education teaches that a business degree does not

Lisa Stone

• Ask customers what they want, then watch what they do

Jeremy Stoppelman

• Yelp's first idea, and the readiness to drop it
• How Yelp adapted to what users did instead

Mark Suster

• Investors back teams because one person runs out
• A chip on the shoulder drives founders, until it steers them

Alexander Tamas

• An investor's advice to look past the payout

Garry Tan

• An idea becomes an innovation only when someone ships it

Tim Westergren

• Believing in an idea when the room thinks it is crazy
• The long, uncertain middle of building something
• Pandora's unpaid years and what kept the staff

Wendy Tan White

• Keeping a business going means staying hungry

Evan Williams

• An optimistic founder needs someone on the team imagining disaster
• Three good goals that pull against each other

Fred Wilson

• Speed comes from a habit of doing, not from haste
• A little outside irritation keeps a company inventive
• Start a company for the idea you cannot drop
• Hunches first, data later, and how to tell when later has come
• The best outcomes often looked ridiculous first
• When the market sours, the business underneath is what remains

Rebecca Woodcock

• A rival's news can be the push a slow launch needed

Yoda

• The word “try” is often an excuse filed in advance

Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten

• When experience starts blocking the way

Mark Zuckerberg

• Move fast and break things, and count what breaks
• Interest can stand in for a plan, up to a point
• Showing a fixed product beats promising one, mostly
• Mark Zuckerberg's lines, and what they meant for building a company

Unattributed

• Half the work is saying what the problem is
• The route to one good idea runs through many bad ones
• Impossible until somebody does it, and sometimes still impossible
• Opportunity often arrives looking like a chore