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

In a user lead model, users are bringing in their own technology… and you can build software then, around the user.

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

The most customer-centric organizations can answer any question by deciding what’s best for the customer, without ever having to ask.

Opportunity lives at the intersection of what people need tomorrow and can be just barely built today.

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.

The IT model of the enterprise has become a lot more user lead.

Any time where the delta b/w what is possible and how things work today is at its widest, that’s an opportunity to go build new technology.

The only way to avoid disruption is to constantly do what you would if you were just starting out.

It’s unfortunate biologically we have to sleep.

Uber is a $3.5 billion lesson in building for how the world *should* work instead of optimizing for how the world *does* work

Better to be right about the trend and wrong about the implementation, than the other way around.

A lot of being productive personally is determined by how you organize your entire business. You can’t separate those two things.

There’s a lot of pride that business owners have. It’s actually really critical that pride and ownership extends to everyone in the organization. I think of everyone is in the same boat in driving the company forward.

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.

If people don’t think the odds are against you, you’re doing it wrong.

Read these 3 books – Crossing the Chasm, Innovators Dilemma and Behind the Cloud.

That window, which has stayed open for nearly five years, with amazing good will from the Afghans, is threatening to close unless the world wakes up and deals with the crisis.

Reading ‘Legitimation Crisis’ in Tehran is nothing less than a masterpiece of moral and political criticism.

We warned when the crisis began in 2011 that unless it was resolved quickly

I’m really good in a crisis, because I don’t panic.

A pioneer in this genre [ writing about the refugee crisis] : the book A Seventh Man, by the great John Berger, decades ago evoked the lives of migrant workers in Europe.

All of us living in today’s world are facing an enormous crisis – arguably the greatest that humanity has ever faced

I think writers can respond by writing about the refugee crisis, by looking at problems faced by migrants, by trying hard to portray them as the human beings that they are.

Bad companies are destroyed by crisis. Good companies survive them. Great individuals, like great companies, find a way to transform weakness into strength.