Uber is a $3.5 billion lesson in building for how the world *should* work instead of optimizing for how the world *does* work
AARON LEVIEAlways look for these changing technology factors- any market that has a significant change in the underlying raw materials …or enabling factors, is an environment that is about to change in a very significant way.
More Aaron Levie Quotes
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I have a lot of faults. I often interrupt in meetings. I talk too loud. I talk too fast.
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Look for new enabling technologies that create a wide gap between how things have been done and how they can be done.
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The best technology is aimed far enough in the future that it stands out, but close enough to the present that it blends in.
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If every customer is using your product “correctly”, you’ll never learn anything interesting about what to do next.
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The only barrier to entry you can create is to consistently build a great product.
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It’s unfortunate biologically we have to sleep.
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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.
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You can look at the cost structure of an incumbent company and discover: where are they not going to be able to drop their prices… because that business model is fundamental to the existence of the company.
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Startups live at the intersection of existential crisis and everything going perfectly great.
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If you’re waiting for encouragement from others, you’re doing it wrong. By the time people think an idea is good, it’s probably too late.
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Why we do what we do: that moment when you get to see the future on your computer screen before the rest of the world.
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I’m obsessed with speed. I’m always asking myself, ‘Why can’t we do things faster? Why can’t it happen more efficiently? Why is this requiring three meetings instead of one?’
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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.
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The chance of failure is almost always better than the guarantee of never knowing.
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A lot of being productive personally is determined by how you organize your entire business. You can’t separate those two things.
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The most customer-centric organizations can answer any question by deciding what’s best for the customer, without ever having to ask.
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Do things that incumbents can’t or won’t do because it’s economically or technically infeasible.
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Every single industry is going through a major business model and technology oriented disruption.
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Startups often win because it’s easier to see what comes next when you don’t have to worry about maintaining what came last.
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Your product should sell itself, but that does not mean you don’t need salespeople.
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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.
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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.
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Jeff Bezos is opening a retail store and owns a newspaper. Turns out everything we thought about the Internet is wrong.
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We didn’t really start the company to go build an enterprise software company.
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Everything about the enterprise, and then by definition the software the enterprise uses has changed – just in the last 5 years.
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Execute like there’s no tomorrow, strategize like there will be.
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