“Over the last ten years, technological advances have dramatically lowered the financial bar for starting a new company, but the courage bar for building a great company remains as high as it has ever been.”

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.

As companies move to web-based computing they get a lot more servers, which are difficult to manage and control. All kinds of problems can arise – security, quality and worms.

Most large mistakes in organizational design come from putting the individual ambitions of the people at the top of the organization ahead of the communication paths for the people at the bottom of the organization.

In a company, hundreds of decisions get made, but objectives and goals are thin.

A manager can’t act like a role model. They need to BE a role model.

If you have never done the job, how do you know what to want?

To succeed at selling a losing product, you must develop seriously superior sales techniques. In addition, you have to be massively competitive and incredibly hungry to survive in that environment.

You’re better off being The Beatles than The Monkees, as a startup.

It’s hard in daily life. It’s even harder in management because it’s the stress of the moment.

Here’s Kanye, the great musical genius of his generation in hip hop, but, like, society really can’t even deal with him because he’s always saying something that people go, ‘Oh, I can’t believe Kanye said that. I can’t believe he did that.’

In Silicon Valley, when you’re a private company, the entrepreneur can do no wrong.

Sometimes an organization doesn’t need a solution; it just needs clarity.

One of the great things about building a tech company is the amazing people that you can hire.

Mark [Andressen] was more popular than me at the time … He was like Beyoncé, I was Kelly Rowlings

Well, let’s see, I found out Pagan has low blood sugar and becomes a complete b–witch if she doesn’t eat a candy bar during a stressful moment.

I’ve always said I’m the worst representative of Muslim-Americans that’s ever existed, because I’ve been inside more bars than mosques.

The guy who wins the Oscar for Best Actor has a much higher bar to clear than the woman who wins best actress.

Whether you are doing it in the bar, the church, the strip joint, or the Himalayas, the first duty of music is to complement and enhance life.

Each role you play, they set a bar of challenges that you meet. And in the past, I’ve played characters that emotionally expressed themselves a bit more in a physical way. It was a joy, actually.

Always have the highest bar for yourself.

The club isn’t the best place to find a lover so the bar is where I go.

I went to the worst of bars hoping to get killed but all I could do was to get drunk again.