“When I was CEO, and I’d listen to music, a lot of people listen to music and you get inspiration from it. And a lot of things in hip hop are very instructive for being in business. Particularly, hip hop is a lot about business, and so it was very useful for me in any job.”

The one thing with stress is, you’ve got to keep your focus on what you can do, not what happened to you.

There is no silver bullet. There are always options and the options have consequences.

The trouble with innovation is that truly innovative ideas often look like bad ideas at the time.

A lot of it is on the job training, combined with excellent mentorship.

Nothing motivates a great employee more than a mission that’s so important that it supersedes everyone’s personal ambition.

There are no shortcuts to knowledge, especially knowledge gained from personal experience. Following conventional wisdom and relying on shortcuts can be worse than knowing nothing at all.

Generally the reason they fail in the job is, you made some mistake in the hiring process in that you didn’t match… them to the needs of your company accurately enough. That’s the #1 reason this fails. And that’s generally a good place to start.

The important thing about mobile is, everybody has a computer in their pocket. The implications of so many people connected to the Internet all the time from the standpoint of education is incredible.

The bigger you get, the harder this gets because the more aggressive the people working for you are.

Every time you make the hard, correct decision you become a bit more courageous, and every time you make the easy, wrong decision you become a bit more cowardly. If you are CEO, these choices will lead to a courageous or cowardly company.

The right answer on raises is you have to be formal. You have to be formal to save your own culture.

What do you get when you cross a herd of sheep with a herd of lemmings? A herd of venture capitalists.

How do you make your company a good place to work in general? That’s a really really really large and complex set of skills.

In life, you don’t have a level of confrontation and the nonsense you run into when you’re a CEO. CEOs aren’t born.

Volatility and length, that’s the value on an option. 10 years on a startup stock, that’s a big valuable thing.

It’s pretty clear that [customers] know what their budgets are now, and what they want to spend it on.

Someone once asked me… whether I waited for inspiration. My answer was: “Every day!”

Just as appetite comes by eating, so work brings inspiration, if inspiration is not discernible at the beginning.

When one door opens, so does another one.

I try to be that inspiration, you know. It’s not as bad as people try to make it seem. I mean, it is, but it’s not. People don’t have to be afraid of it; they don’t have to be held down by it. Try to find triumph in the situation.

Let all the poison that lurks in the mud, hatch out.

Give crowns and pounds and guineas But not your heart away; Give pearls away and rubies, But keep your fancy free.

Love is a universal migraine. A bright stain on the vision, Blotting out reason.

You should not be carried away by the dictation of the mind, but the mind should be carried by your dictation.