“In life, you don’t have a level of confrontation and the nonsense you run into when you’re a CEO. CEOs aren’t born.”

The only thing that prepares you to run a company is running a company.

A key thing in being a leader is you’ve got to pause yourself.

I emphasize to C.E.O.s, you have to have a story in the minds of the employees. It’s hard to memorize objectives, but it’s easy to remember a story.

Relationships built from a business do better than the reverse.

Groupon looked like a very high valuation, but any investment in a great company at any stage is almost always a good investment.

Planning is valuable, tho the plan is usually useless.

When raising money, you want to look through the lens of ‘What happens when things go wrong?’

Your employees know each other better than they know you.

The person they’re working with, is going to be the person they’ll know more. So if that person leaves, they’re going to go – well, should have I left too? What did they get and how does that compare to my deal.

Breakthrough ideas usually come from guys who look like they’re hallucinating

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.

Productivity is driven at the enterprise level. Better wages, better performing workplaces, are driven at the workplace level.

For me, if you distill comedy down, it is surprise and the unexpected. That has to be it on its most base level, in any form.

Look, it’s a mainstream animated movie, and how often are those considered thought provoking? It’s meant to be a great time at the theater, but it’s also designed to work on more than one level

The time to sing is when your emotional level is just too high to speak anymore, and the time to dance is when your emotions are just too strong to only sing about how you feel.

You get the odd person [in social media] that will write something nasty and the trick is not to engage with them on any level.

Is the ambient noise level of my life low enough for me to hear the whispers of the Lord?

I did not like prizes at school. I didn’t like tests or exams, or the 11+, or O-levels. Later I hated B.A.s and M.A.s. The reason I hated them is that I don’t like being tested, failed or falsely praised by anyone.

I will not lower the standard of the Bible to my level of experience.