“You’re better off being The Beatles than The Monkees, as a startup.”

Wartime CEO is too busy fighting the enemy to read management books written by consultants who have never managed a fruit stand.

When you’re making a critical decision, you have to understand how it’s going to be interpreted from all points of view. Not just your point of view, not just the person you’re talking to, but the people that aren’t in the room. Everybody else.

These decisions intensify when you run a company, because the consequences get magnified 1,000 fold. As in life, the excuses for CEOs making the wrong choice are always plentiful.

Business ends up being very dynamic and situational.

I don’t believe in statistics. I believe in calculus.

Early in my career as an engineer, I’d learned that all decisions were objective until the first line of code was written. After that, all decisions were emotional.

Note to self: It’s a good idea to ask, “What am I not doing?

Hire sales people who are really smart problem solvers, but lack courage, hunger and competitiveness, and your company will go out of business.

You know what the difference between a vision and a hallucination is? They call it a vision when other people can see it.

There are no silver bullets.

There are no silver bullets.

It turns out that is exactly what product strategy is all about—figuring out the right product is the innovator’s job, not the customer’s job.

I believe in strength over lack of weakness.

Here’s where we are and here’s what I didn’t recognize about us and about you when I made the decision, and now it is what it is.

The one thing with stress is, you’ve got to keep your focus on what you can do, not what happened to you.

There is no silver bullet. There are always options and the options have consequences.

We seek to be as nimble as a startup.

If you manage to build a sustainable product, revenue will follow. A lot of startups fail because they concentrate on incremental innovations, increasing user base, and monetisation before strengthening the core of their business.

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

When valuing a startup, add $500k for every engineer, and subtract $250k for every MBA.

Startups often win because it’s easier to see what comes next when you don’t have to worry about maintaining what came last.

You’d better have the technology knowledge. I really urge you not to think you can start a whole company and business with just ideas on paper, because you’ll end up owning so few of those ideas.