Aaron Levie Quotes
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My downtime tends to resemble my uptime. Weekends are workdays, but toned down. Over the whole weekend, I may have five meetings, as opposed to six on a weekday. I used to play piano for 30 minutes at night, but I had to pull that out of my schedule. I don't have time for nonwork stuff.
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Innovation is hard because solving problems people didn't know they had & building something no one needs look identical at first.
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If you're in your early 20s and you're hanging out with a bunch of other people in their early 20s, nobody has a sense of the kinds of problems that real 'workers' run into every day. They're running into a completely different set of problems like 'what's the party going on right now that I should be going to?
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The only way to avoid disruption is to constantly do what you would if you were just starting out.
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All we're really doing is repeating technologies that were tried 10, 20, 30 years ago... it's just that it was too expensive, too unusable, and we didn't have the enabling technologies to make it possible.
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The 10% between 90% done to 100% done takes most of the time, causes most of the stress, but is all of the value.
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That's already been tried before only means the first attempt got it wrong.
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The product that wins is the one that bridges customers to the future, not the one that requires a giant leap.
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The best technology is aimed far enough in the future that it stands out, but close enough to the present that it blends in.
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Startups often win because it's easier to see what comes next when you don't have to worry about maintaining what came last.
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What happens to the Microsofts, Oracles and IBMs of the world is that when they get big enough, they don't think they need to bring that same level of focus and energy to the end-user experience.
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We're enamored with the concept that there's always a price. But sometimes, your goal is to build a great company, not sell it.
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Go after the customers that are working in the future, but haven't totally lost their minds.
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I have a lot of faults. I often interrupt in meetings. I talk too loud. I talk too fast.
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It's unfortunate biologically we have to sleep.
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Always look for these changing technology factors- any market that has a significant change in the underlying raw materials ...or enabling factors, is an environment that is about to change in a very significant way.
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When you're doing something you're passionate about, stress becomes a featurenot a bug.
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Jeff Bezos is opening a retail store and owns a newspaper. Turns out everything we thought about the Internet is wrong.
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My mom is proud of me. But she might not be too happy about the hours I keep or how little I eat. I wake up so late that it would be inappropriate to have breakfast. At most, I will have a snack in the day and dinner. I realize that it's not the healthiest way to live, but it's all I really have time for.
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I'm obsessed with speed. I'm always asking myself, 'Why can't we do things faster? Why can't it happen more efficiently? Why is this requiring three meetings instead of one?'
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There's a lot of pride that business owners have. It's actually really critical that pride and ownership extends to everyone in the organization. I think of everyone is in the same boat in driving the company forward.
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If there could've ever been a magical time to build an enterprise software company, now is absolutely that time.
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Innovation in tech favors the naive and the stubborn. If you are too rational you won't tackle problems that others once failed at.
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Focus too much on the near-term and you won't get tomorrow's customers, focus too much on the long-term and you won't get today's.
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Why we do what we do: that moment when you get to see the future on your computer screen before the rest of the world.
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Read these 3 books - Crossing the Chasm, Innovators Dilemma and Behind the Cloud.
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Modularize, don't customize. Build a platform as opposed to building all of the custom technology and custom vertical experiences.
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Listen to your customers, but don't always build exactly what they're telling you. This is a really key distinction around building enterprise software.
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In a user lead model, users are bringing in their own technology... and you can build software then, around the user.
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They can bring the technology in, then you can sell to the enterprise when they want to have better control, better security... you still have the same biz model as a traditional enterprise sw company, but the way to get into the company is through the end user.
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