I think I’m the kind of person who would be very difficult to employ – I’m pretty annoying, but driven.
AARON LEVIEEverything about the enterprise, and then by definition the software the enterprise uses has changed – just in the last 5 years.
More Aaron Levie Quotes
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Companies have never won. You’re always either fighting for survival, or fighting for relevance.
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Look for new enabling technologies that create a wide gap between how things have been done and how they can be done.
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The best technology is aimed far enough in the future that it stands out, but close enough to the present that it blends in.
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In an IT lead world, incumbents generally win because they have the existing relationship with the IT organization.
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In the enterprise you want to start intentionally small.
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Modularize, don’t customize. Build a platform as opposed to building all of the custom technology and custom vertical experiences.
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Startups live at the intersection of existential crisis and everything going perfectly great.
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You’ll learn more in a day talking to customers than a week of brainstorming, a month of watching competitors, or a year of market research.
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I think bad politics are incredibly dangerous, so it’s important to make sure that people are communicating well. Culture and morale are super important. It’s best to not force it, but let it happen organically and genuinely.
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The benefit to building a startup is that customers don’t have the same kind of friction when they adopt new technology.
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If every customer is using your product “correctly”, you’ll never learn anything interesting about what to do next.
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In a user lead model, users are bringing in their own technology… and you can build software then, around the user.
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When you’re doing something you’re passionate about, stress becomes a featurenot a bug.
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We didn’t really start the company to go build an enterprise software company.
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If people don’t think the odds are against you, you’re doing it wrong.
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You want to find the really crazy but still somewhat reasonable outliers within the customer ecosystem.
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Better to be right about the trend and wrong about the implementation, than the other way around.
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What happens to the Microsofts, Oracles and IBMs of the world is that when they get big enough, they don’t think they need to bring that same level of focus and energy to the end-user experience.
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You intentionally start small, because you will not be able to compete with an incumbent… because the incumbent is always going to go for the full solution.
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Better to be too early and have to try again, than be too late and have to catch up.
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That’s already been tried before only means the first attempt got it wrong.
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I think people are always able to achieve more than they think they can. While that’s cliche, I don’t know if managers think about that enough. You have to set your sights extremely high.
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Tip: Take the stodgiest, oldest, slowest moving industry you can find. And build amazing software for it.
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Uber is a $3.5 billion lesson in building for how the world *should* work instead of optimizing for how the world *does* work
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Any time where the delta b/w what is possible and how things work today is at its widest, that’s an opportunity to go build new technology.
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My workday begins around 11 A.M., with a cup of black coffee in each hand. If I had more hands, there would be more coffee.
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