Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Hard work isn't enough. And more work is never the real answer. The sort of grit you need to scale a business is less reliant on brute force. It's actually one part determination, one part ingenuity, and one part laziness.
I usually allocate time each week to work on topics outside of the normal workflow. These topics can be multi-year strategies for work, theories of how the world is changing, or just something refreshingly different or new.
I think we realized the depth of frustration through the current political process. So we said, "OK, we know there's a serious problem here, we know we need to work on it," and now it's "Oh, we need to work on it a lot faster."
I think the randomness by Donald Trump's governing, by tweeting, sloganeering, attacking, will create great chaos in the entire market. I think people will have difficulties in predicting the future. I think capital will recede.
One of the challenges in networking is everybody thinks it's making cold calls to strangers. Actually, it's the people who already have strong trust relationships with you, who know you're dedicated, smart, a team player, who can help you.
One thing I learned in '97, when I thought the right time to found a company was during a swing-up, is that it's much better to start during an economic downturn. Partnerships are easier; hiring is easier; and the competition starts later.
Blitzscaling is always managerially inefficient - and it burns through a lot of capital quickly. But you have to be willing to take on these inefficiencies in order to scale up. That's the opposite of what large organizations optimize for.
I think 'Settlers of Catan' is such a well-designed board game - it's the board game of entrepreneurship - that I made a knockoff called 'Startups of Silicon Valley.' It's literally - it's the same rules but just a different skin set to it.
One of the metaphors that I use for start-ups is, you throw yourself off a cliff and assemble your airplane on the way down. If you don't solve the right problem at the right time, that's the end. Mortality puts priorities into sharp focus.
Over the last 20 years, I've worked on or invested in many companies that scaled to 100 million users or more. But here's the thing: You don't start with 100 million users. You start with a few. So, stop thinking big, and start thinking small.
The actual, the forming of ties with a group of people around you where they help you grow as a professional, solve problems, get opportunities, and you help them, is actually the constitutive base of the foundation of a strong, modern career.
Zynga is about fun. Fun is important. Fun is good. And to have the ability to do something fun for 10 or 15 minutes that's right at your fingertips and involves your friends, well, that's better than television in terms of social connectivity.
We've been working for years on how we can use technology to help people make their own jobs, become entrepreneurs, create their own small businesses. Those are the kinds of things that I and a bunch of other people at LinkedIn actually work on.
I wish to be focused on kind of the business stuff I'm doing, how do I contribute to our economic progress, how do I help create a future for American industry, American middle class, these kind of things. Those things actually really matter to me.
MySpace is like a bar, Facebook is like the BBQ you have in your back yard with friends and family, play games, share pictures. Facebook is much better for sharing than MySpace. LinkedIn is the office, how you stay up to date, solve professional problems.
If you contrast the productivity that comes from a networked or capitalist distribution of resources versus a centralized planning system, frequently referred to as communism or socialism, the network approach does much better when it's applied accurately.
Observe, orient, decide, act. It's fighter pilot terminology. If you have the faster OODA loop in a dogfight, you live. The other person dies. In Silicon Valley, the OODA loop of your decision-making is effectively what differentiates your ability to succeed.
Part of what being a great founder is, is being both able to hold the belief, to think about where it is you want to be doing and want to be going, but also be smart enough that you are essentially listening to criticism, negative feedback, competitive entries.
Death Row inmates are almost twice as expensive to house each year as other inmates. Death penalty trials are much costlier than trials where execution is not a potential punishment and consume more time from judges, public defenders, and other legal personnel.
As a candidate, Trump could make outlandish statements with little regard for their Constitutional implications. As President, he is pledged to respect the Constitution's authority, and the specific rights and protections it guarantees to every American citizen.
Blitzscaling is what you do when you need to grow really, really quickly. It's the science and art of rapidly building out a company to serve a large and usually global market, with the goal of becoming the first mover at scale. This is high-impact entrepreneurship.
People will be discovering that the Internet helps their career. One of my theses is that every individual is now a small business; how you manage your own personal career is the exact way you manage a small business. Your brand matters. That is how LinkedIn operates.
People are still very focused on the startup story: Risk-taking founders, with a bold idea, some capital and a network supportive environment, go out and take the shot on goal. But the problem is, this is no longer the truth about what makes Silicon Valley so special.
That's part of the reason why we also need to focus on, how do I give to society, how do I participate in society, how do I make society a better place, because, by the way, it's good for me, but it's also good for all of us in the environment in which we live and work.
When you think about being contrarian, you have to think about - how is it that smart people will disagree with me, disagree with me ...from a position of intelligence, and there is something that I know that they don't know, that will actually in fact play out to be true.
In democracies, we aren't always governed by the people or the parties that we voted for. But when officials are elected, we must respect their authority, as long as they're exercising that authority within the bounds of whatever regulatory frameworks are in place to guide them.
In the past, individuals and companies envisioned a lifetime mutual commitment. That's not realistic anymore - nor is it in the interest of either party. So both parties need a more adaptable way to engage each other and co-invest over shorter periods of time for mutual benefit.
Many employer-employee relationships are built on a lie that starts from the first interaction: neither party automatically conceives of the relationship as something that will last a lifetime, but both interact as if it is. This lie of omission bases the relationship on distrust.
To have your parents get divorced at a young age, there's a lot of turbulence. We all grew up together, in some way. It was not idyllic. It was intense, vibrant, sometimes oppressive. I felt I was very much in a world of my own. I didn't meld much in school. I was kind of a loner.
The death penalty and the arguments it inspires don't only involve ethics, morals, and justice. There are bureaucratic and economic aspects to it as well. All these different aspects commingle in ways that convince me we should take whatever steps we can to abolish the death penalty.
I was never given this advice, people aren't given this advice, focus on growing and maintaining relationships for your network, and that's key. And most of the advice tends to be, you know, discover your strengths, build up your resume, get a title, all of that stuff pales in comparison.
One of the things that happens that's challenging within the democratic process is that people say, 'Look at this failure, so we should totally change this whole thing.' And then you add in tons of bureaucratic process and checks and balances, and all of a sudden, it doesn't work that well.
Leaders, whether in the public or the private sphere, must understand the responsibilities that come with their role. They are the most visible standard-bearers of their organizations. Holding them accountable to this responsibility protects the promise of our organizations and our communities.
I'm sympathetic to the people who go, "Whoa, we'd like to have the benevolent, wise dictator. It will all work much more efficiently," but the reason that we remain staunch democrats - with a small d - is it's a decades long, it's a centuries long, it's a country long process for being inclusive.
The thing that changes your professional life, your capabilities, your learning, your understanding, your opportunity flow, your ability to make things happen, is the center relationships you have with powerful and effective people around you in the industry, in the activity that you want to be doing.
I think I have a good track record, both in commercial investing and in philanthropic investing. I don't have any interest in creating a named foundation; I have an interest in really good impact for capital. I think I'm pretty good at doing it, so I'm going to apply myself to doing it in my lifetime.
Trump often says he needs to keep his tax returns private until the IRS finishes auditing him. But the IRS itself has said this isn't necessary. And recently, Trump changed his tune, saying he'll release his returns as soon as Hillary Clinton releases the 33,000 emails she deleted from her email server.
The reason the social-networking phenomenon is something that I invested in early and massively - I led the Series A financing for Friendster; I founded a company called Socialnet in 1997; I founded LinkedIn; and I was part of the first round of financing in Facebook - it sounds trivial, but people matter.
We want to be inclusive. We want to have our shareholders, our employees, our customers, whether they are Democrat, Republican, Green or Libertarian, to feel comfortable with how we're doing business. And so that tends to be apolitical. People say, 'No, no, I just simply shouldn't get involved in politics.'
During normal times or boom times, there are some parts of the business that are going to so well, that that can cover for weakness and other parts of the business. What happens during recessions, is you have less windfalls just helping you cover mistakes. You have to be more careful about not making mistakes.
Some people mistake grit for sheer persistence - charging up the same hill again and again. But that's not quite what I mean by the word 'grit.' You want to minimize friction and find the most effective, most efficient way forward. You might actually have more grit if you treat your energy as a precious commodity.
Silicon Valley tends to believe in the individual who creates a small group and does something big. Democracy is always frustrating, but it creates a society that, for example, allows us to invest in each other's kids, to have public education, to have both a greater society and individual freedom for creating businesses.
The key thing in any kind of guiding of the business is how do you create a strong organization that is kind of accelerating into the future. And when you're in trouble, the question is, what are the techniques that you can, you know, trim, refinance, sell, et cetera, in order to get this business back to that characteristic.
One of the things is when you think, "Wait, I'm fearful of retaliation, I'm fearful of oppression because of someone who is going into a public office, who might be vengeful for their own personal reasons, that's actually not a reason to hide - that's a reason to step up, right?"This is part of what we learned from the 1920s.
As an entrepreneur and investor, I prioritize construction and collaboration. Whether it's a five-person start-up or a global giant, the companies that are most productive are the ones whose employees operate with a shared sense of purpose and a clear set of policies for responding to changing conditions and new opportunities.
The key thing is to invest in the future and what that means is when you're deploying technology or you're a technology business, is to make sure that you're keeping on the innovation cycle, where you're both creating and adopting the new business practices, and the new techniques in order to drive your business the right way.
The key thing is to invest in the future, and what that means is - when you're deploying technology or you're a technology business - is to make sure that you're keeping on the innovation cycle, where you're both creating and adopting the new business practices and the new techniques in order to drive your business the right way.
The key thing that I find that when you're kind of in boom times and you're hiring bunches, if you can hire, you know, always maintain very high standards and even if you, you know, can't find enough of, you know, what is typically called A players, then don't hire the people. All right? So, you know, use that as a way of standards.
We have made a huge amount of progress over the last 50 years by enabling trade, by enabling kind of collaboration and learning. And actually, in fact, when you look at your average 30-year-old today, they're much better off than a 30-year-old 20 years ago, 30 years ago, because of progress in technology and health care and all the rest of this.
One of the great strengths of American culture is this empowerment of individual, is the individual being able to be entrepreneurial, create new things. But you create a whole group of people to make great companies. It's employees and investors and customers and partners. The fabric of society, of a network of relations, is key to being successful.