I can’t imagine anything less interesting in business than maximizing shareholder value. Yet this is what public companies are pressured — if not legally required — to do. A lot of non-public companies follow the same path towards performance and results.
To take it further, maximization as a concept just isn’t interesting to me. I don’t care about... See more
Fast iteration can make up for a lot; it’s usually ok to be wrong if you iterate quickly. Plans should be measured in decades, execution should be measured in weeks.
I just talked to a founder whose startup is growing "only" 25% a year and thus felt he needed to get bought. I explained that if he did, he'd need to find somewhere to invest the proceeds, and he'd be unlikely to find any investments that grew at 25% a year.
Reaching your goals is not success if you compromise your values along the way.
Getting ahead shouldn't force you to leave people behind. No accomplishment is worth sacrificing kindness or integrity.
Ambition shapes what you achieve. Character is defined by how you achieve it.
The trouble with exponential growth is that the curve feels flat in the beginning. It isn't; it's still a wonderful exponential curve. But we can't grasp that intuitively, so we underrate exponential growth in its early stages.
Brave thing I heard in a board meeting this week: “I don’t know if we have a good answer to that, yet.”
Admitting you *don’t know* the answer is hugely productive. We’re trying to find, together, the important things we don’t know the answers to
Striking how rarely it is said
Marc Andreessen, who wrote: “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.”