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

I have a lot of faults. I often interrupt in meetings. I talk too loud. I talk too fast.

Go after the customers that are working in the future, but haven’t totally lost their minds.

The product that wins is the one that bridges customers to the future, not the one that requires a giant leap.

Focus too much on the near-term and you won’t get tomorrow’s customers, focus too much on the long-term and you won’t get today’s.

We’re enamored with the concept that there’s always a price. But sometimes, your goal is to build a great company, not sell it.

Execute like there’s no tomorrow, strategize like there will be.

Look for new enabling technologies that create a wide gap between how things have been done and how they can be done.

Every single industry is going through a major business model and technology oriented disruption.

Innovation in tech favors the naive and the stubborn. If you are too rational you won’t tackle problems that others once failed at.

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

I’m certainly not into money and prestige. For me there is simply nothing more exciting than people involved in the creation of great products. That is what drives me.

Sometimes things are the way they are and can’t be changed, other times it’s because no one ever tried. Your job is to find the latter.

Do things that incumbents can’t or won’t do because it’s economically or technically infeasible.

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.

If every customer is using your product “correctly”, you’ll never learn anything interesting about what to do next.

The only barrier to entry you can create is to consistently build a great product.

I’ve learned over decades of building that a deadline is a potent tool for problem-solving.

And there are days when just going into work and building something from someone else’s drawing sounds like going back to heaven.

It always surprises me when donors who operate successful businesses assume that just building a school structure means that a community now has access to education.

Closeness to another person is like a fear of falling off a building to me. It’s really, like, physically painful, and it’s a brand of crazy I don’t appreciate having.

But as I’ve gotten older, and I look at the world, I think there’s a lot of ways in which that kind of building up from the smallest building blocks doesn’t actually account for the world.

What counts more than style is whether architecture improves our experience of the built world; whether it makes us wonder why we never noticed places in quite this way before.

Who’s afraid of the big, bad buildings? Everyone, because there are so many things about gigantism that we just don’t know.

My life is about building and working and wrenching on some cars.