Start with the assumption that the best way to do something is not the way it’s being done right now.
AARON LEVIEWe’re enamored with the concept that there’s always a price. But sometimes, your goal is to build a great company, not sell it.
More Aaron Levie Quotes
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Go after the customers that are working in the future, but haven’t totally lost their minds.
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Listen to your customers, but don’t always build exactly what they’re telling you. This is a really key distinction around building enterprise software.
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Uber is a $3.5 billion lesson in building for how the world *should* work instead of optimizing for how the world *does* work
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Modularize, don’t customize. Build a platform as opposed to building all of the custom technology and custom vertical experiences.
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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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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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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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Your product should sell itself, but that does not mean you don’t need salespeople.
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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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Better to be too early and have to try again, than be too late and have to catch up.
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Tip: Take the stodgiest, oldest, slowest moving industry you can find. And build amazing software for it.
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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.
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You can keep ‘consumer’ DNA at the center of your product. That will always mean that adoption is easier.
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The IT model of the enterprise has become a lot more user lead.
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Everything about the enterprise, and then by definition the software the enterprise uses has changed – just in the last 5 years.
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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.
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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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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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Better to be right about the trend and wrong about the implementation, than the other way around.
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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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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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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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In a user lead model, users are bringing in their own technology… and you can build software then, around the user.
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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.
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The best technology is aimed far enough in the future that it stands out, but close enough to the present that it blends in.
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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.
AARON LEVIE