Business
There is much talk in the business press about the need for a paradigm shift to focus on customers. I think we need to take a lesson from the Starship Enterprise and engage in a paradigm warp.
John Scarry
I want to be able to explain my mistakes. This means I do only the things I completely understand.
Warren Buffett
A simple rule that all investors should follow—if you don’t understand how the investment works don’t invest.
Stewart Weltman, Esq.
I thing it’s impossible to really innovate unless you deal with all aspects of a problem. What you find is that if you can only deal with yolks or whites, it’s pretty hard to make an omelet.
Gene Amdahl
Patience is for someone without a budget.
Frank Pacetta
An explanation doesn’t have to be true, it has to appear to be true.
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty has a great fall.
All the King’s horses and all the King’s men
Formed an ad hoc committee to consider the situation.
Nothing has to be true. It only has to sound true.
There’s a saying around here. “No lost sale goes unrewarded.”
I love to win.
Carol McLarty
This project will give you plenty of exposure. I’d heard that before. But there are only two kinds of exposure as far as I’m concerned—one you get arrested for and the other you die from.
John Scarry
Your last project was actually both commercially viable and original. Unfortunately the part that was commercially viable was not original, and the part that was original was not commercially viable.
David Thorne
What I love about the marketplace is that we do our products, we tell people about them, and if they like them, we get to come to work tomorrow.
Steve Jobs
If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.
Henry Ford
The problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have no taste and I don’t mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way.
Steve Jobs
What you think is “socially acceptable”, or proper, or “the way that it should be” has absolutely nothing to do with the way you should be running your business.
Gary Vaynerchuk
The quickest way to go out of business is to be a romantic about how you make your money.
Gary Vaynerchuk
Don't be irreplaceable. If you can't be replaced, you can't be promoted.
Your business model is your destiny
Ben Thompson
Verify that there is an existing market opportunity in the form of real customers willing to pay you real money to solve a problem.
Pete Forde
You can win an argument with your boss. You can win an argument with your wife. You can even win an argument with God. But you will never win an argument with your customer.
MicroISV
People aren’t looking at the billboards anymore. They aren’t even looking at the fucking road anymore.
Gary Vaynerchuk
I like social media because it sells shit.
Gary Vaynerchuk
Growth isn't profit.
Our goal is to develop a thing that does a clearly defined set of some stuff that customers will be willing to pay for.
When I interview candidates, I take half of the resumes we receive and throw them in the trash. I don't want to hire unlucky people.
As long as the manager’s prestige and power are tied to the size of their budget, they will be motivated to expand their organization.
Conway's Law
Spelling is nice. Grammar is useful. Vocabulary is entertaining. Communication is everything.
Aviatrix
If you haven't been hacked by the Chinese you got to ask yourself, does the shit you're doing really even matter?
@StartupLJackson
The customer is usually wrong; but statistics indicate that it doesn’t pay to tell him so.
Aleister Crowley
Never cave into accepting a client who is already refusing to listen to you when you say “no”.
I write for my pleasure, but publish for money.
Vladimir Nabokov
Google didn't have a better idea. They had a better implementation of the same idea. Ideas are cheap and worthless. Implementation is the difference between success and failure.
Dan J.
After an employee made a mistake that cost the company $10 million, he walked into the office of Tom Watson, the C.E.O., expecting to get fired. “Fire you?” Mr. Watson asked. “I just spent $10 million educating you.”
Thomas J. Watson
If the marketing types don’t exploit it, it probably doesn't exist.
Linda D. Pendleton, CFI
I see people opining on these things all of the time based on historical prices and that is not a proper way to value an asset. You need to have some fundamental theory of value and then apply it rigorously.
Fred Wilson
…other factors are more important to success — that better beats worse, integrated beats fragmented, simple beats complicated.
John Gruber
Culture more broadly is an organization’s greatest asset right up until it becomes a curse.
Ben Thompson
The reason the stock market is hard to predict is because it is a prediction.
If you’ve already made a prediction, predicting what is wrong about your prediction is really hard — if you knew that, you would have just made that part of your prediction to begin with.
Andrew Critch
The unspoken part of “Move fast and break things.” is that you are supposed to fix what you’ve broken.
People who are right a lot of the time are people who often changed their minds.
Jeff Bezos
It is a lot of hard work staying up with your customers and understanding and thinking through where are the opportunities. What are other suppliers in the market not doing for those customers that you can do better for them?
Bob Young, Founder of Red Hat
Customers don’t buy products, they buy things that make themselves more successful.
Paraphrase of Lou Gerstner, CEO IBM
Do not believe that it is very much of an advance to do the unnecessary three times as fast.
Peter Drucker
He was given the opportunity to succeed elsewhere.
The kind of things that we love to work on are those where there’s a requirement for hardware, software, and services to come together, because we believe that the magic really occurs at that intersection.
Tim Cook, CEO Apple
If you want to reach a large audience appeal to idiots.
A. Schopenhauer
I was an English major. The only thing I know about capitalism is if I see a period, the next letter should be bigger.
Michael Palascak
NFPs [Non-fungible people] are usually individual contributors, not managers. The management function is much easier to replace than a uniquely skilled individual.
Fred Wilson
Those who make the best consumers don’t know they are being sold a product.
Amy Sousa
Regulation is about predictability and familiarity, bringing order out of chaos. Thinking similar. Innovation is about unpredictability and unfamiliarity, it is about thinking differently. Creativity loves constraints, but it doesn’t love rules. When regulations mandate means, rather than ends, they create a box which to think outside of is prohibited by law.
Louis Anslow
You’re suffering from an occupational disease. When an international financier is confronted by a holdup man with a gun, he automatically hands over not only his money and jewelry but also his shirt and pants, because it doesn’t occur to him that a robber might draw the line somewhere.
Nero Wolfe
It’s always desirable to get your name in the paper, provided it’s not in the obituary column.
Archie Goodwin
It’s not what you can do; it’s what you can take credit for.
Mrs Olsen
The unrestricted competition so commonly advocated does not leave us the survival of the fittest. The unscrupulous succeed best in accumulating wealth.
Rutherford B. Hayes, 19th US president
Here is how platforms die. First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
Cory Doctorow
Being a change agent means you're going to discomfit people around you. You're going to interrupt the “way we do things.”
Laura Patterson