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.
AARON LEVIEYour product should sell itself, but that does not mean you don’t need salespeople.
More Aaron Levie Quotes
-
-
A lot of being productive personally is determined by how you organize your entire business. You can’t separate those two things.
AARON LEVIE -
If people don’t think the odds are against you, you’re doing it wrong.
AARON LEVIE -
Modularize, don’t customize. Build a platform as opposed to building all of the custom technology and custom vertical experiences.
AARON LEVIE -
It’s unfortunate biologically we have to sleep.
AARON LEVIE -
The benefit to building a startup is that customers don’t have the same kind of friction when they adopt new technology.
AARON LEVIE -
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.
AARON LEVIE -
I don’t use many apps. I use naps.
AARON LEVIE -
All we’re really doing is repeating technologies that were tried 10, 20, 30 years ago… it’s just that it was too expensive, too unusable, and we didn’t have the enabling technologies to make it possible.
AARON LEVIE -
Jeff Bezos is opening a retail store and owns a newspaper. Turns out everything we thought about the Internet is wrong.
AARON LEVIE -
Execute like there’s no tomorrow, strategize like there will be.
AARON LEVIE -
Start with something simple and small, then expand over time. If people call it a ‘toy’ you’re definitely onto something.
AARON LEVIE -
Start with the assumption that the best way to do something is not the way it’s being done right now.
AARON LEVIE -
You can keep ‘consumer’ DNA at the center of your product. That will always mean that adoption is easier.
AARON LEVIE -
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.
AARON LEVIE -
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.
AARON LEVIE -
If every customer is using your product “correctly”, you’ll never learn anything interesting about what to do next.
AARON LEVIE -
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.
AARON LEVIE -
Look for new enabling technologies that create a wide gap between how things have been done and how they can be done.
AARON LEVIE -
Focus too much on the near-term and you won’t get tomorrow’s customers, focus too much on the long-term and you won’t get today’s.
AARON LEVIE -
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.
AARON LEVIE -
The chance of failure is almost always better than the guarantee of never knowing.
AARON LEVIE -
Go after the customers that are working in the future, but haven’t totally lost their minds.
AARON LEVIE -
Read these 3 books – Crossing the Chasm, Innovators Dilemma and Behind the Cloud.
AARON LEVIE -
If you don’t go to every level of your company, you distance yourself from the marketplace and from your people.
AARON LEVIE -
Too little process and you can’t get good work done. Too much process and you can’t get any work done. Most companies never find the middle.
AARON LEVIE -
Entrepreneurship: 10% coach, 20% player, 30% cheerleader, 40% waterboy.
AARON LEVIE