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

Aaron Levie

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
Better to be too early and have to try again, than be too late and have to catch up.
AARON LEVIE

Catch Early Late Too Try Trying
You want to find the really crazy but still somewhat reasonable outliers within the customer ecosystem.
AARON LEVIE

Crazy Customer Ecosystem Reasonable
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
We’re going from a world of customized software to standardized platforms.
AARON LEVIE

Building Custom Platform Standard World
All we’re really doing is repeating technologies that were tried 10, 20, 30 years ago… it’s just that it was too expensive, too unusable, and we didn’t have the enabling technologies to make it possible.
AARON LEVIE

Ago Done Enabling Repeat Technology Year
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.
AARON LEVIE

Computer Future Moment Screen World
Jeff Bezos is opening a retail store and owns a newspaper. Turns out everything we thought about the Internet is wrong.
AARON LEVIE

Internet Newspaper Retail Store Wrong
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
We didn’t really start the company to go build an enterprise software company.
AARON LEVIE

Building Company Enterprise Software Start
The benefit to building a startup is that customers don’t have the same kind of friction when they adopt new technology.
AARON LEVIE

Adopt Benefits Customer Friction Kind Technology
I think I’m the kind of person who would be very difficult to employ – I’m pretty annoying, but driven.
AARON LEVIE

Annoy Driven Kind Thinking Would
The 10% between 90% done to 100% done takes most of the time, causes most of the stress, but is all of the value.
AARON LEVIE

Cause Done Percentage Stress Time
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
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.
AARON LEVIE

Able Building Incumbent Intention Start
That’s already been tried before only means the first attempt got it wrong.
AARON LEVIE

Attempt First Mean Tried Wrong

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

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

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