“Better to be too early and have to try again, than be too late and have to catch up.”

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.

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

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

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.

At an early age, my mother gave me this feeling that anything is possible, and I believe that.

A lot of success in life and business comes from knowing what you want to avoid: early death, a bad marriage, etc.

We learned early on that if we help enough people, the money will come.

Fear can infect us early in life until eventually it cuts a deep groove of apprehension in all our thinking. To counteract it, let faith, hope and courage enter your thinking. Fear is strong, but faith is stronger yet.

The value of old age depends upon the person who reaches it. To some men of early performance it is useless. To others, who are late to develop, it just enables them to finish the job.

Early diagnosis is so important because the earlier a mental illness can be detected, diagnosed and treatment can begin, the better off that person can be for the rest of his or her life.

He who gives early gives twice.

Basically, I started singing when I started talking. Music has just been my saving grace my whole life.