In a company, hundreds of decisions get made, but objectives and goals are thin.
The implications of so many people connected to the Internet all the time from the standpoint of education is incredible.
The bad thing about young people starting a company is that sometimes they do it for the wrong reasons or because they have the wrong skill set, but the good thing is that they don’t have any of the old paradigms baked into them, so they have a lot of the bright new ideas that are harder to come by as you get older.
As long as people are clear on what they need to do and what’s going on, you’re very likely to succeed. When nobody is clear, then you’re guaranteed to fail.
Most books on management are written by management consultants, and they study successful companies after they’ve succeeded, so they only hear winning stories.
The hardest thing about starting a company and running a company is, there’s just so many expectations on you, and there are so many people who have things that they want you to do. It’s a lot like life about that.
A wartime C.E.O. may not delegate. They make every decision based on the next product release. They may use a lot of profanity.
When screening engineers from other companies, its smart to value engineers from great companies more than those from mediocre companies.
I think there’s a lot to be said about just enjoying your work. It can be very contrived when people say their work is for the good of mankind.
Going public today is fraught with peril on many levels. One is earnings guidance. If you miss guidance, the stock price becomes very volatile. Short sellers can put a tremendous downward pressure on the stock.
You have to be responsible when you’re running an organization, and firing people who are your friends is part of that responsibility.
You can’t worry about the mistakes, because you’re going to make a lot of them. You’ve got to be thinking about your next move.
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.
Most of my job and most of what I do is to mentor people. There are a lot of people I work with that I don’t have investments in.
I do think a lot of people are trying to do important things still, and I think it is really a great thing that entrepreneurship is getting easier. When I started, it was just much harder to begin a company.
I think when companies are struggling, they don’t want to talk to the press. The guys who write business books aren’t interested in it because nobody wants to learn what it’s like to be a mess, you want to learn how to be successful. That’s slanted the whole thing quite a bit.
I would have never wanted to write another management book. There are so many of them, and everybody says the same thing about them, and they are all the same – they give the exact same advice. It’s like a diet book; they all say eat less calories, exercise more, and every single book has the same conclusion.
I emphasize to C.E.O.s, you have to have a story in the minds of the employees. It’s hard to memorize objectives, but it’s easy to remember a story.
Many of the people that you lay off will have closer relationships with the people who stay than you do, so treat them with an appropriate level of respect.
I think that business book reporting, it’s all Jim Collins, it’s the story of victory; it’s success bias over and over again.
In order to build a great technology company, you have to hire lots of incredibly smart people. It’s a total waste to have lots of big brains but not let them work on your biggest problems.
When I was CEO, and I’d listen to music, a lot of people listen to music and you get inspiration from it. And a lot of things in hip hop are very instructive for being in business. Particularly, hip hop is a lot about business, and so it was very useful for me in any job.
Groupon looked like a very high valuation, but any investment in a great company at any stage is almost always a good investment.
In Silicon Valley, when you’re a private company, the entrepreneur can do no wrong.
Nobody knows how to be a CEO. It’s something you have to learn. It’s a very lonely job.
Every employee in a company depends on the C.E.O. to make fast, high-quality decisions.