The most fundamental reason that even businesspeople underestimate the importance of sales is the systematic effort to hide it at every level of every field in a world secretly driven by it.
A lot of the key to Apple’s succes is Designing technology in order to hide it.
Darwinism may be a fine theory in other contexts, but in startups, intelligent design works best.
Value investors look at cash flows. If a company can maintain present cash flows for 5 or 6 years, it’s a good investment. Investors then just hope that those cash flows – and thus the company’s value – don’t decrease faster than they anticipate.
In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable.
The best entrepreneurs know this: every great business is built around a secret that’s hidden from the outside. A great company is a conspiracy to change the world; when you share your secret, the recipient becomes a fellow conspirator.
You’ll attract the employees you need if you can explain why your mission is compelling: not why it’s important in general, but why you’re doing something important that no one else is going to get done.
It’s a horribly mismanaged company-probably a lot of pot smoking going on there.
Big part of the challenge to innovation is that people too easily resign themselves to dying.
The biggest secret in venture capital is that the best investment in a successful fund equals or outperforms the entire rest of the fund combined.
I believe we are in a world where innovation in stuff was outlawed. It was basically outlawed in the last 40 years – part of it was environmentalism, part of it was risk aversion.
As an investor-entrepreneur, I’ve always tried to be contrarian, to go against the crowd, to identify opportunities in places where people are not looking.
Great tech opportunities happen only once.
Probably the most extreme form of inequality is between people who are alive and people who are dead.
There are only two kinds of businesses in this world: Businesses in crazy competition, and businesses that are one of a kind.
The lowest-hanging fruit in preventative medicine is just to really focus on nutrition.
A company does better the less it pays the CEO.
Anyone who prefers owning part of your company to being paid in cash reveals a preference for the long term and a commitment to increasing your company’s value in the future.
What nerds miss is that it takes hard work to make sales look easy.
If you think your initial market might be too big, it almost certainly is.
I think anything that requires real global breakthroughs requires a degree of intensity and sustained effort that cannot be done part time, so it’s something you have to do around the clock, and that doesn’t compute with our existing educational system.