Better to be too early and have to try again, than be too late and have to catch up.
AARON LEVIELook for new enabling technologies that create a wide gap between how things have been done and how they can be done.
More Aaron Levie Quotes
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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.
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Innovation in tech favors the naive and the stubborn. If you are too rational you won’t tackle problems that others once failed at.
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My dad is a chemical engineer, and my mom was a teacher. They were pretty serious about education, but I always thought about things a little bit differently.
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Start with the assumption that the best way to do something is not the way it’s being done right now.
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If every customer is using your product “correctly”, you’ll never learn anything interesting about what to do next.
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Jeff Bezos is opening a retail store and owns a newspaper. Turns out everything we thought about the Internet is wrong.
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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.
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Opportunity lives at the intersection of what people need tomorrow and can be just barely built today.
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You can look at the cost structure of an incumbent company and discover: where are they not going to be able to drop their prices… because that business model is fundamental to the existence of the company.
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If you don’t go to every level of your company, you distance yourself from the marketplace and from your people.
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Your product should sell itself, but that does not mean you don’t need salespeople.
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In the enterprise you want to start intentionally small.
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I think I’m the kind of person who would be very difficult to employ – I’m pretty annoying, but driven.
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The 10% between 90% done to 100% done takes most of the time, causes most of the stress, but is all of the value.
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Too little process and you can’t get good work done. Too much process and you can’t get any work done. Most companies never find the middle.
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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.
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Execute like there’s no tomorrow, strategize like there will be.
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Startups live at the intersection of existential crisis and everything going perfectly great.
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The most customer-centric organizations can answer any question by deciding what’s best for the customer, without ever having to ask.
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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.
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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.
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Look for new enabling technologies that create a wide gap between how things have been done and how they can be done.
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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.
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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.
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Start with something simple and small, then expand over time. If people call it a ‘toy’ you’re definitely onto something.
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The benefit to building a startup is that customers don’t have the same kind of friction when they adopt new technology.
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