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

Companies have never won. You’re always either fighting for survival, or fighting for relevance.

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.

To many managers, getting rid of the arrogant, undisciplined, over-paid, technology-obsessed, improperly-dressed etc. programmers would appear to be a significant added benefit

Remember that an act of love always benefits at least two people.

Everything seems to be designed for the benefit of the automobile and not the benefit of the human being.

Maybe this Watergate is like the Old Testament. It was visited upon us and maybe were going to benefit from it.

Pride causes us to use our gifts as though they came from ourselves, not benefits received from God, and to usurp our benefactor’s glory.

It’s not about curing the disease, but healing the life; then the physical benefits come.

You benefit from getting in enough volume at the beginning of your training.

Men that talk of their own benefits are not believed to talk of them because they have done them, but to have done them because they might talk of them.