I have never thought of writing for reputation and honor. What I have in my heart must come out; that is the reason why I compose. – Ludwig van Beethoven.
Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than smart.
You can’t build a reputation on what you’re going to do. – Henry Ford.
Remember that you are influencing people who are watching you.
His idea is to get your team together and pretend that your product has failed. That’s right: failed, cratered, imploded, or “went aloha oe,” as we say in Hawaii. You ask the team to come up with all the reasons why the failure occurred. Then each member has to state one reason until every reason is on a list. The next step is to figure out ways to prevent every reason from occurring.
Entrepreneurship is about doing, not learning to do.
Sometimes blissful ignorance is awfully empowering.
If you can’t describe your business model in ten words or fewer, you don’t have a business model.
You should always be selling – not strategizing about selling. Don’t test, test, test – that’s a game for big companies. Don’t worry about being embarrassed. Don’t wait to develop the perfect product or service. Good enough is good enough. There will be plenty of time for refinement later. It’s not how great you start – it’s how great you end up.
Mission statements are long, dull, and forgettable.
It’s easy to imagine a young person asking his parents if he should go to work for a startup and being told, “Don’t. It’s too risky. Get a job in a nice, safe company that will be around a long time – like Lehman Brothers, Arthur Andersen, or Enron.
There are very few people who don’t become more interesting when they stop talking. – Mary Lowry.
The genesis of great companies is answering simple questions that change the world, not the desire to become rich.
Life is too short to work with people you don’t like – especially.
If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late. – Reid Hoffman.
Hiring better than yourself means that you hire for strengths as opposed to hiring on the basis of the lack of weaknesses. A great leader hires people for their strengths and then assigns them tasks that take advantage of those strengths.
It’s not what you know or who you know, but who knows you. – Susan RoAne.
For example, how much do you think a senior vice president of Microsoft who came from McKinsey knows about starting a company?
Trying to minimize weakness doesn’t produce strength.
Can we get a bank loan to start our business? Answer you’re looking for: “No,” assuming it’s a tech business. Tech businesses don’t have liquid assets to use as collateral.