Businesspeople From The United States

"Building your product is easy. The hard part is getting customers."

"Startups demand comfort with chaos, uncertainty and change."

"No business plan survives its first contact with customers."

"Only because earlyvangelists are buying into your total vision will they spend money for an incomplete, buggy, barely functions first product."

"Market type influences everything a company does."

"The Silicon Valley entrepreneurial culture used to be limited to a few entrepreneurial clusters. Now the Internet has spread that culture everywhere."

"In a startup, founders define the product vision and then use customer discovery to find customers and a market for that vision."

"If you're afraid to fail in a startup, you're destined to do so."

"The best startups discover a situation where customers have tried to build a solution themselves."

"Don’t execute other peoples advice if you can’t explain why you’re doing it."

"A startup is not a smaller version of a large company."

"Number one is "Do you have curiosity?" Number two is "Does it translate to imagination?" But number three is "Did it translate to action?" That’s the difference between someone with an idea and someone who is an entrepreneur."

"A startup is a temporary organization in search of a scalable, repeatable, profitable business model."

"We used to pivot by firing people. Now we fire the hypotheses."

"Customer Development says “Glad you have these hypotheses about your startup. All of them are probably wrong.”"

"Progress and stability are mutually exclusive."

"On Day One, a startup is a faith-based enterprise."

"Don't believe your own b.s. It's real easy to confuse funding with success."

"When I was young, I learned a quote in Sunday school that has stayed with me throughout my life. It said, 'teach us to number our days that we gain a heart of wisdom.' * Most of us will wake up 28,762 days- and then one day - we won’t. That means you have about 21,000 days left - and about 14,000 of them for your career. So herein lies the urgency."

"Mentorship is a two-way street. While I was learning from them [brilliant mentors] - and their years of experience and expertise - what I was giving back was equally important. I brought fresh insights and new perspectives to their thinking."

""Build it and they will come” is not a strategy; it’s a prayer."

"There are several generations of Silicon Valley CEOs who "pay-it-forward." It’s an understood, underground thing you don’t talk about. You give back to younger founders and entrepreneurs without asking for anything. The goal is to pass on what we learned to make our startup ecosystem better."

"Relentless execution without knowing what to execute is a crime."

"80% of success in your career will come from just showing up. The world is run by those who show up…not those who wait to be asked."

"Innovation comes from those who see things that other don’t."

"Founders are truly artists – they see something no one else does."

"A founder's skill is knowing how to recognize new patterns and to pivot on a dime. At times the pattern is noise, and the vision turns out to be a hallucination."

"While there is an occasional bad apple, the public market rewards companies with revenue growth and sustainable profits."

"Confusing testosterone with strategy is a bad idea."

"Entrepreneurship is an art, not a job."

"Entrepreneurs are artists and I mean “artists” in the true sense of the word: they see something no one else does."

"Strategy Is not a to-do list."

"Founders fit the definition of a composer: they see something no one else does. And to help them create it from nothing, they surround themselves with world-class performers."

"Customers don't ask to see your business plan."

"In Silicon Valley, we have a special word for a failed entrepreneur – it’s called experienced."

"There are no facts inside the building, so get the hell outside."

"To predict the future, 1/3 of your team needs to be crazy."

"Young entrepreneurs tend to be fearless and have no respect for the status quo, and that’s exactly what you need in an environment where the status quo is going to put you out of business."

"I was a history major at Bowdoin and as I looked at different movements in different stages in history, it was clear to me that it was important to have some segments of any particular group work within the system. These people could bring an enlightened view or a different set of perspectives. I thought to work totally outside the system was destructive and counter-productive in the long term. … what I think was unique about Bowdoin — and maybe it was the size of the school and its environment — is that you couldn’t isolate yourself. We had real discourse, real debate on the issues. At the same time, there was also respect. As a result, people saw you on a personal level, not just as a representative of a certain group or of certain ideas. And I think that was quite important."

"I found that Bowdoin had some exceptional black graduates. It was incredible reading about their trials and tribulations and successes coming into an environment that was sometimes hostile, or at the very least mixed in its reception. I also learned that there were a few people in the local community and faculty members who played important roles for these individuals. Writing that paper gave me a sense of awe at the level of talent that had come to Bowdoin over the years. You asked me how I ended up at Bowdoin. Frankly it is far more interesting to find out how these people wound up at Bowdoin and what sustained them, what got them through. What Bowdoin can be, and should be proud of, is that it had some incredibly illustrious and impressive blacks who went there during some very challenging times. … The College’s breadth and depth of talent and its very history were impressive. Also, the fact that the Afro-Am was a site for the Underground Railroad was very poignant and very meaningful to me."

"I think, at the end of the day, that it is a mistake simply to pursue a job. Instead, you should pursue a way of life. The opportunity for me is to make a fundamental difference in people’s lives, both inside and outside the company. To lead a very successful enterprise that is not just focused on achieving business success. That’s a consequence of doing the right things for our employees and our customers.The challenge of operating a global company is a terrific, terrific opportunity. You cannot be successful as a CEO in the short, moderate or long term if you don’t have a passion for what you’re doing. Because the challenges and the issues are so substantial that if you don’t have that passion, you’re going to wilt. Fortunately, I think I’ve got that passion."

"Ken says in his interview something that we have heard from other Bowdoin graduates — that Bowdoin provided not only a challenging academic environment amid some great natural beauty and interesting colleagues, but that it was also quite simply a good place to think. Suggesting that pure reflection has that kind of power and value is, in this world of perpetual stimulus, surprising."

"After 9-11, I told our senior management team that this was a tremendous leadership challenge that each of us was facing and I wanted them to be courageous. I wanted them to be decisive, to not shirk away from taking tough actions. I also told them to be compassionate. If the organization believed that they were not compassionate, particularly in these times, they would lose their privilege to lead. I wouldn’t be the one to take away their leadership – the organization – the people — would. Compassion can be offered without sacrificing a sense of urgency or a strong will to win. That’s one of the values I believe in very strongly, and I talk about it in the organization. I want to win the right way. I’m very competitive. I’ve got a strong will to win, but I want to win the right way. That’s my focus."

"We believe that the Statue of Liberty is an important symbol of freedom for our country. And as [film director] Martin Scorcese, who is involved in the Statue’s latest fundraising campaign, said, what is most impressive is not just what the Statue of Liberty represents for Americans but really what it represents to the whole world."

"So how do we leave neoliberalism behind and build a more sustainable, more prosperous and more equitable society? The new economics suggests just five rules of thumb. First is that successful economies are not jungles, they're gardens, which is to say that markets, like gardens, must be tended, that the market is the greatest social technology ever invented for solving human problems, but unconstrained by social norms or democratic regulation, markets inevitably create more problems than they solve. Climate change, the great financial crisis of 2008 are two easy examples."

"Inclusion creates economic growth. So the neoliberal idea that inclusion is this fancy luxury to be afforded if and when we have growth is both wrong and backwards. The economy is people. Including more people in more ways is what causes economic growth in market economies...The third principle is the purpose of the corporation is not merely to enrich shareholders. The greatest grift in contemporary economic life is the neoliberal idea that the only purpose of the corporation and the only responsibility of executives is to enrich themselves and shareholders. The new economics must and can insist that the purpose of the corporation is to improve the welfare of all stakeholders: customers, workers, community and shareholders alike."

"So, market capitalism is an evolutionary system in which prosperity emerges through a positive feedback loop between increasing amounts of innovation and increasing amounts of consumer demand. Innovation is the process by which we solve human problems, consumer demand is the mechanism through which the market selects for useful innovations, and as we solve more problems, we become more prosperous. But as we become more prosperous, our problems and solutions become more complex, and this increasing technical complexity requires ever higher levels of social and economic cooperation in order to produce the more highly specialized products that define a modern economy. Now, the old economics is correct, of course, that competition plays a crucial role in how markets work, but what it fails to see is that it is largely a competition between highly cooperative groups -- competition between firms, competition between networks of firms, competition between nations -- and anyone who has ever run a successful business knows that building a cooperative team by including the talents of everyone is almost always a better strategy than just a bunch of selfish jerks."

"Greed is not good. Being rapacious doesn't make you a capitalist, it makes you a sociopath. And in an economy as dependent upon cooperation at scale as ours, sociopathy is as bad for business as it is for society.... Neoliberal economic theory has sold itself to you as unchangeable natural law, when in fact it's social norms and constructed narratives based on pseudoscience. If we truly want a more equitable, more prosperous and more sustainable economy, if we want high-functioning democracies and civil society, we must have a new economics."

"Raising wages doesn't kill jobs that creates them because for instance when restaurant owners are suddenly required to pay restaurant workers enough so that now even they can afford a restaurant doesn't shrink the restaurant business it grows it obviously."

"Many economists would have you believe that their field is an objective science. I disagree, and I think that it is equally a tool that humans use to enforce and encode our social and moral preferences and prejudices about status and power, which is why plutocrats like me have always needed to find persuasive stories to tell everyone else about why our relative positions are morally righteous and good for everyone: like, we are indispensable, the job creators, and you are not; like, tax cuts for us create growth, but investments in you will balloon our debt and bankrupt our great country; that we matter; that you don't. For thousands of years, these stories were called divine right. Today, we have trickle-down economics. How obviously, transparently self-serving all of this is."