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

The chance of failure is almost always better than the guarantee of never knowing.

You’ll learn more in a day talking to customers than a week of brainstorming, a month of watching competitors, or a year of market research.

What happens to the Microsofts, Oracles and IBMs of the world is that when they get big enough, they don’t think they need to bring that same level of focus and energy to the end-user experience.

In an IT lead world, incumbents generally win because they have the existing relationship with the IT organization.

I think people are always able to achieve more than they think they can. While that’s cliche, I don’t know if managers think about that enough. You have to set your sights extremely high.

The 10% between 90% done to 100% done takes most of the time, causes most of the stress, but is all of the value.

Jeff Bezos is opening a retail store and owns a newspaper. Turns out everything we thought about the Internet is wrong.

Modularize, don’t customize. Build a platform as opposed to building all of the custom technology and custom vertical experiences.

We’re going from a world of customized software to standardized platforms.

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.

The benefit to building a startup is that customers don’t have the same kind of friction when they adopt new technology.

If you don’t go to every level of your company, you distance yourself from the marketplace and from your people.

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’ll be proud to say my country is committed to preventing violence against women.

Even when I was rebelling against my father, the point was to follow my own intuition and instinct.

The state security bodies should not be seen as an institution that works against society and the state; one needs to understand what makes them work against their own people.

I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering.

I stand up for what I believe in, and a lot of the time that can be against people’s opinions.

I stand up for what I believe in, and a lot of the time that can be against people’s opinions.

Taking action means saying ‘no’ to indifference. If there is a war to be waged, it is the war against the indifference which is eating away at our societies.