First figure out your partners, then figure out what ideas to pursue. The most important thing isn’t the market you target, the product you develop or the financing, but the founding team.
Building a visionary company requires one percent vision and 99 percent alignment.
In a truly great company profits and cash flow become like blood and water to a healthy body: They are absolutely essential for life but they are not the very point of life.
Those who turn good organizations into great organizations are motivated by a deep creative urge and an inner compulsion for sheer unadulterated excellence for its own sake.
Level 5 leaders are a study in duality: modest and willful, humble and fearless.
Most people will look back and realize they did not have a great life because it’s just so easy to settle for a good life.
If you have more than three priorities then you don’t have any.
Whether you prevail or fail depends more on what you do to yourself than on what the world does to you.
A dream is a feeling that sticks – and propels.
A great company will have many once-in-a-liftetime opportunities.
It took Einstein ten years of groping through the fog to get the theory of special relativity, and he was a bright guy.
Consider the idea that charisma can be as much a liability as an asset. Your strength of personality can sow the seeds of problems, when people filter the brutal facts from you.
Faith in the endgame helps you live through the months or years of buildup.
People need BHAGs – big hairy audacious goals.
Good is the enemy of great.
Focusing solely on what you can potentially do better than any other organization is the only path to greatness.
Mediocrity results first and foremost from management failure, not technological failure.
The signature of mediocrity is not an unwillingness to change. The signature of mediocrity is inconsistency.
It is more important to know who you are than where you are going, for where you are going will change as the world around you changes.
The only way to deliver to the people who are achieving is to not burden them with the people who are not achieving.