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

Startups live at the intersection of existential crisis and everything going perfectly great.

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?’

Listen to your customers, but don’t always build exactly what they’re telling you. This is a really key distinction around building enterprise software.

You want to find the really crazy but still somewhat reasonable outliers within the customer ecosystem.

You intentionally start small, because you will not be able to compete with an incumbent… because the incumbent is always going to go for the full solution.

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.

“to industry.’ Let us change the word, ‘industry,’ to ‘persevering prayer,’ and the motto will be more Christian and more worthy of universal adoption.

Nothing is impossible,’ said one of the seven sages of Greece.

An adopted son shall never take the family, name and the estate of his natural father, the funeral cake follows the family, name and the estate, the funeral offerings of him who gives, his son in adoption cease, as far as that son is concerned.

Shame on those breasts of stone that cannot melt in soft adoption of another’s sorrow.

Very few people who met my adoptive mother in the last 20 years of her life could abide her, while many people who have seen my play find her fascinating. Heavens, what have I done?!

Too many children in foster care are falling through cracks. Be a hero, take the time learn about adoption today.

My sister is Korean and my parents adopted her about three years before I was born and that is how I grew up.

Adoption has been a part of my life and a part of my family, so it was how I wanted to start. It felt natural and right to me.