For people who are readers, reading is important to them.
You’re not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.
If there’s one reason we have done better than of our peers in the Internet space over the last six years, it is because we have focused like a laser on customer experience.
The balance of power is shifting toward consumers and away from companies. The right way to respond to this, if you are a company, is to put the vast majority of your energy, attention, and dollars into building a great product or service, and put a smaller amount into shouting about it, marketing it.
We are pioneers and the history of pioneers is not that good.
We were hoping to build a small profitable company; and of course, what we’ve done is build a large, unprofitable company.
There’s so much stuff that has yet to be invented. There’s so much new that’s going to happen. People don’t have any idea yet how impactful the internet is going to be and that this is still Day 1 in such a big way.
But there’s so much kludge, so much terrible stuff, we are at the 1908 Hurley washing machine stage with the Internet. That’s where we are. We don’t get our hair caught in it, but that’s the level of primitiveness of where we are. We’re in 1908.
We also have no incentive compensation of any kind. And the reason we don’t is because it is detrimental to teamwork.
It’s perfectly healthy-encouraged, even- to have an idea tomorrow that contradicted your idea today.
We innovate by starting with the customer and working backwards. That becomes the touchstone for how we invent.
The death knell for any enterprise is to glorify the past – no matter how good it was.
I think one of the things people don’t understand is we can build more shareholder value by lowering product prices than we can by trying to raise margins. It’s a more patient approach, but we think it leads to a stronger, healthier company. It also serves customers much, much better.
If we think long term, we can accomplish things that we couldn’t otherwise accomplish.
We watch our competitors, learn from them, see the things that they were doing for customers and copy those things as much as we can.
If you’re long-term oriented, customer interests and shareholder interests are aligned.
Maintain a firm grasp of the obvious at all times.
Cultures aren’t so much planned as they evolve from that early set of people.
The Net is pretty cool, but the physical world is the best medium ever.
We’re working to lower the cost of spaceflight so that many people can afford to go and so that we humans can better continue exploring the solar system. Accomplishing this mission will take time, and we’re working on it methodically.