Location 134:

Until you make the effort to get to know someone or something, you don’t know anything. There are no shortcuts to knowledge, especially knowledge gained from personal experience. Following conventional wisdom and relying on shortcuts can be worse than knowing nothing at all.

Location 148:

Former secretary of state Colin Powell says that leadership is the ability to get someone to follow you even if only out of curiosity.

Location 225:

In retrospect, it’s easy to think both the Web browser and the Internet were inevitable, but without Marc’s work, it is likely that we would be living in a very different world. At the time most people believed only scientists and researchers would use the Internet. The Internet was thought to be too arcane, insecure, and slow to meet real business needs. Even after the introduction of Mosaic, the world’s first browser, almost nobody thought the Internet would be significant beyond the scientific community—least of all the most important technology industry leaders, who were busy building proprietary alternatives.

Location 301:

Most business relationships either become too tense to tolerate or not tense enough to be productive after a while. Either people challenge each other to the point where they don’t like each other or they become complacent about each other’s feedback and no longer benefit from the relationship.

Location 557:

Then one day I asked myself a different question: “What would I do if we went bankrupt?” The answer that I came up with surprised me: “I’d buy our software, Opsware, which runs in Loudcloud, out of bankruptcy and start a software company.”

Location 560:

Then I asked myself another question: “Is there a way to do that without going bankrupt?” I ran through different scenarios in my mind where we might move into the software business and exit the cloud business.

Location 816:

about—figuring out the right product is the innovator’s job, not the customer’s job. The customer only knows what she thinks she wants based on her experience with the current product. The innovator can take into account everything that’s possible, but often must go against what she knows to be true. As a result, innovation requires a combination of knowledge, skill, and courage. Sometimes only the founder has the courage to ignore the data;

Location 938:

Startup CEOs should not play the odds. When you are building a company, you must believe there is an answer and you cannot pay attention to your odds of finding it. You just have to find it. It matters not whether your chances are nine in ten or one in a thousand; your task is the same.

Location 1336:

There may be nothing scarier in business than facing an existential threat. So scary that many in the organization will do anything to avoid facing it. They will look for any alternative, any way out, any excuse not to live or die in a single battle. I see this often in startup pitches.

Location 1343:

There comes a time in every company’s life where it must fight for its life. If you find yourself running when you should be fighting, you need to ask yourself, “If our company isn’t good enough to win, then do we need to exist at all?”

Location 1432:

The world looks one way in peacetime but very different when you must fight for your life every day. In times of peace, one has time to care about things like appropriateness, long-term cultural consequences, and people’s feelings. In times of war, killing the enemy and getting the troops safely home is all that counts.

Location 1450:

Most workplaces are far from good. As organizations grow large, important work can go unnoticed, the hardest workers can get passed over by the best politicians, and bureaucratic processes can choke out the creativity and remove all the joy.

Location 1500:

You might argue that no matter how well managed a company is, it will fail without product/market fit. You might argue further that horribly managed companies that achieve massive product/market fit succeed just fine. And you would be right on both accounts. So was it really necessary for me to make such a dramatic speech and threaten one of my executives? I think it was, for the following three reasons:   Being a good company doesn’t matter when things go well, but it can be the difference between life and death when things go wrong.   Things always go wrong.   Being a good company is an end in itself.

Location 1520:

In technology companies, when the employees disappear, the spiral begins: The company declines in value, the best employees leave, the company declines in value, the best employees leave. Spirals are extremely difficult to reverse.