Quotes about "Innovation & Entrepreneurship"

In life, everybody faces choices between doing what's popular, easy, and wrong vs. doing what's lonely, difficult, and right. These decisions intensify when you run a company, because the consequences get magnified 1,000 fold. As in life, the excuses for CEOs making the wrong choice are always plentiful. ”

In my own experience as a C.E.O., I would find myself laying awake at 3 A.M. asking questions about my business, and there weren't management books out there that could help me. ”

You read these management books that say, 'These are the hard things about running a company.' But those aren't really the hard things. The hard things are when you have to layoff half your company, or you have to fire your best friend. Or you have to figure out a way not to go bankrupt. ”

When you found a company, you have the original vision, you make all the original decisions, you know every employee, you kind of know every aspect of the product architecture and its limitations. ”

I described the CEO job as knowing what to do and getting the company to do what you want. Designing a proper company culture will help you get your company to do what you want in certain important areas for a very long time. ”

It helps to have founded and run a company if you're going to help somebody run a company who is a founder. ”

When screening engineers from other companies, its smart to value engineers from great companies more than those from mediocre companies. ”

Hire sales people who are really smart problem solvers, but lack courage, hunger and competitiveness, and your company will go out of business. ”

John D. Rockefeller said that he found friendships based on business to be far more long lasting and profitable than the reverse. I think there's something to that. A company can end up being very Confucian, where the good of the individual is subjugated to the good of the whole. ”

Shareholder activism works when activists understand something about the characteristics of the business that the board doesn't. ”