“The trouble with innovation is that truly innovative ideas often look like bad ideas at the time.”

Generally the reason they fail in the job is, you made some mistake in the hiring process in that you didn’t match… them to the needs of your company accurately enough. That’s the #1 reason this fails. And that’s generally a good place to start.

The important thing about mobile is, everybody has a computer in their pocket. The implications of so many people connected to the Internet all the time from the standpoint of education is incredible.

The bigger you get, the harder this gets because the more aggressive the people working for you are.

Every time you make the hard, correct decision you become a bit more courageous, and every time you make the easy, wrong decision you become a bit more cowardly. If you are CEO, these choices will lead to a courageous or cowardly company.

The right answer on raises is you have to be formal. You have to be formal to save your own culture.

What do you get when you cross a herd of sheep with a herd of lemmings? A herd of venture capitalists.

How do you make your company a good place to work in general? That’s a really really really large and complex set of skills.

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.

Volatility and length, that’s the value on an option. 10 years on a startup stock, that’s a big valuable thing.

It’s pretty clear that [customers] know what their budgets are now, and what they want to spend it on.

As companies move to web-based computing they get a lot more servers, which are difficult to manage and control. All kinds of problems can arise – security, quality and worms.

Most large mistakes in organizational design come from putting the individual ambitions of the people at the top of the organization ahead of the communication paths for the people at the bottom of the organization.

In a company, hundreds of decisions get made, but objectives and goals are thin.

A manager can’t act like a role model. They need to BE a role model.

If you have never done the job, how do you know what to want?

To succeed at selling a losing product, you must develop seriously superior sales techniques. In addition, you have to be massively competitive and incredibly hungry to survive in that environment.

Don’t worry about being able to identify each of these plants (in your designs for clients). The world is full of botanists and horticulturists. All you have to do is design.

I listened to many different types of instruments and music, and have always tried to look at the bass as an instrument as opposed to only a bass.

Look – every time is the wrong time and the perfect time to have a kid, and you just do it when you can.

I’m always looking to rock out. But it isn’t really about rocking out versus being mellow, in terms of your personal satisfaction. In the end, you just want to be good.

I think the Republican Party is… accurately defined as a party that looks out for the interests of the very wealthy.

I look at the Senior Al Gore that I had the chance to serve in the Senate with. A great human being. He went down to defeat to this right wing bunch back at the time.

We’re only truly secure when we can look out our kitchen window and see our food growing and our friends working nearby.

I think that she looks great. I think that as Jennifer Aniston gets older, she looks better and better, and I really like that.