“Listen to your customers, but don’t always build exactly what they’re telling you. This is a really key distinction around building enterprise software.”

Companies have never won. You’re always either fighting for survival, or fighting for relevance.

Startups live at the intersection of existential crisis and everything going perfectly great.

I’m obsessed with speed. I’m always asking myself, ‘Why can’t we do things faster? Why can’t it happen more efficiently? Why is this requiring three meetings instead of one?’

You want to find the really crazy but still somewhat reasonable outliers within the customer ecosystem.

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.

The chance of failure is almost always better than the guarantee of never knowing.

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.

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.

In an IT lead world, incumbents generally win because they have the existing relationship with the IT organization.

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.

The 10% between 90% done to 100% done takes most of the time, causes most of the stress, but is all of the value.

Jeff Bezos is opening a retail store and owns a newspaper. Turns out everything we thought about the Internet is wrong.

Modularize, don’t customize. Build a platform as opposed to building all of the custom technology and custom vertical experiences.

We’re going from a world of customized software to standardized platforms.

Why we do what we do: that moment when you get to see the future on your computer screen before the rest of the world.

The benefit to building a startup is that customers don’t have the same kind of friction when they adopt new technology.

We have not come to compete with one another. We have come to complete one another.

Concepts differentiate architecture from mere building…A bicycle shed with a concept is architecture; a cathedral without one is just a building.

So that buildings and structures you normally pass without a glance suddenly become arresting, even beautiful? Well, they seem to have that light in Australia nearly all the time.

I’ve had a lot of experience building things, organizing things, a national scholarship program.

I know that New York is big, there are huge buildings, but in fact, it’s quite small and contained.

Big Ben just kept building up. It ended up coming off the field. It kept taking over. Superman kept taking over Clark Kent and you just never saw who Ben Roethlisberger was any more.

I live in an apartment building built in 1925, and it hasn’t been heavily renovated, so I feel very much connected to that time and what went on in that place.

A good 80 percent of the vault is still physical and another percentage of it, 20, 25 percent is mental.