“We didn’t really start the company to go build an enterprise software company.”

In a user lead model, users are bringing in their own technology… and you can build software then, around the user.

You can keep ‘consumer’ DNA at the center of your product. That will always mean that adoption is easier.

The most customer-centric organizations can answer any question by deciding what’s best for the customer, without ever having to ask.

Opportunity lives at the intersection of what people need tomorrow and can be just barely built today.

I think bad politics are incredibly dangerous, so it’s important to make sure that people are communicating well. Culture and morale are super important. It’s best to not force it, but let it happen organically and genuinely.

The IT model of the enterprise has become a lot more user lead.

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.

The only way to avoid disruption is to constantly do what you would if you were just starting out.

It’s unfortunate biologically we have to sleep.

Uber is a $3.5 billion lesson in building for how the world *should* work instead of optimizing for how the world *does* work

Better to be right about the trend and wrong about the implementation, than the other way around.

A lot of being productive personally is determined by how you organize your entire business. You can’t separate those two things.

There’s a lot of pride that business owners have. It’s actually really critical that pride and ownership extends to everyone in the organization. I think of everyone is in the same boat in driving the company forward.

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.

If people don’t think the odds are against you, you’re doing it wrong.

Read these 3 books – Crossing the Chasm, Innovators Dilemma and Behind the Cloud.

In the, uh, ’30s and ’40s, the Brill Building was the hub of, uh, musical activity in Tin Pan Alley in New York City.

I think people need housing. And there’s empty buildings, I think people should live in there.

When the president during the campaign said he was against nation building,

With my hand in his, I looked at all the apartment buildings with rushes of love, peering in the wide streetside windows that revealed living rooms painted in dark burgandies and matte reds.

More people are interested in trying to shuffle paper assets around than building lasting assets by producing real goods.

Otherwise, I think the building can be bigger, larger, and the city can be much more crazy. The problem is the government structure is so deadly stupid, not really solving problems but creating a lot of problems itself every day.

Rooms are a fixed size, which can’t be altered without pulling down walls and building new ones.

The strategy for peace-building in Afghanistan is economic aid, reconstruction, international security forces. On those lines, the U.S. has been extremely slow. And it has even blocked expanding security forces from Kabul to other cities.