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

Aaron Levie

Start with something simple and small, then expand over time. If people call it a ‘toy’ you’re definitely onto something.
AARON LEVIE

Definite Expand People Simple Toy
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.
AARON LEVIE

Dangerous Important Incredible People Politics Thinking
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.
AARON LEVIE

Achieve Cliche People Sight Thinking
It’s unfortunate biologically we have to sleep.
AARON LEVIE

Biological Sleep Unfortunate
Tip: Take the stodgiest, oldest, slowest moving industry you can find. And build amazing software for it.
AARON LEVIE

Amazing Industry Moving Slow Software Stodgiest
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 LEVIE

Billion Doe Instead Optimize Uber World
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.
AARON LEVIE

Energy Focus IBM Microsoft Oracle Thinking World
You want to find the really crazy but still somewhat reasonable outliers within the customer ecosystem.
AARON LEVIE

Crazy Customer Ecosystem Reasonable
Startups live at the intersection of existential crisis and everything going perfectly great.
AARON LEVIE

Crisis Existential Great Perfectly Startup
The chance of failure is almost always better than the guarantee of never knowing.
AARON LEVIE

Always Chance Failure Guarantee Know Knowing
Go after the customers that are working in the future, but haven’t totally lost their minds.
AARON LEVIE

Building Customer Future Lost Mind Working
My dad is a chemical engineer, and my mom was a teacher. They were pretty serious about education, but I always thought about things a little bit differently.
AARON LEVIE

Dad Education Mom Pretty Serious Teacher
The product that wins is the one that bridges customers to the future, not the one that requires a giant leap.
AARON LEVIE

Bridge Future Giant Leap Require Winning
If you don’t go to every level of your company, you distance yourself from the marketplace and from your people.
AARON LEVIE

Company Distance Level Marketplace People
You can keep ‘consumer’ DNA at the center of your product. That will always mean that adoption is easier.
AARON LEVIE

Adoption Consumer DNA Easier Mean
Do things that incumbents can’t or won’t do because it’s economically or technically infeasible.
AARON LEVIE

Building Incumbent Infeasible Technical Thing

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

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

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Popular Authors

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