My own theory is that we are in the middle of a dramatic and broad technological and economic shift in which software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy.
I think 2012 is the year when consumers all around the world start saying no to feature phones and start saying yes to smartphones.
I’ve been an entrepreneur three times. I started three companies.
More and more major businesses and industries are being run on software and delivered as online services – from movies to agriculture to national defense.
An awful lot of successful technology companies ended up being in a slightly different market than they started out in.
A very large percentage of economic activity is shifting online and it makes sense that there are more services that are going to charge. It also means there are going to be more people willing to pay.
If you’re unhappy, you should change what you’re doing.
These days, you have the option of staying home, blogging in your underwear, and not having your words mangled. I think I like the direction things are headed.
There is a constant need for new systems and new software.
You only ever experience two emotions: euphoria and terror. And I find that lack of sleep enhances them both.
I know where I’m putting my money.
No one should expect building a new high-growth, software-powered company in an established industry to be easy. It’s brutally difficult.
There’s always more demands than there’s time to meet them, so it’s constantly a matter of trying to balance them.
With lower start-up costs and a vastly expanded market for online services, the result is a global economy that for the first time will be fully digitally wired-the dream of every cyber-visionary of the early 1990s, finally delivered, a full generation later.
In the next 10 years, I expect at least five billion people worldwide to own smartphones, giving every individual with such a phone instant access to the full power of the Internet, every moment of every day.
Today’s leading real-world retailer, Wal-Mart, uses software to power its logistics and distribution capabilities, which it has used to crush its competition.
If we’re in a bubble, it’s the weirdest bubble I’ve ever seen, where everybody hates everything.
The world is a very malleable place. If you know what you want, and you go for it with maximum energy and drive and passion, the world will often reconfigure itself around you much more quickly and easily than you would think.
I’m a firm believer that most people who do great things are doing them for the first time. Returning to my theory of hiring, I’d rather have someone all fired up to do something for the first time than someone who’s done it before and isn’t that excited to do it again. You rarely go wrong giving someone who is high potential the shot.
To do original work, it is not necessary to know something nobody else knows. It is necessary to believe something few other people believe.
Markets that don’t exist don’t care how smart you are.