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Thoughts about business, venture capital, and capitalism.
Quote | Author | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Henry Ford didn't invent automobiles. In 1902, at least 50 US firms manufactured and sold cars mostly to wealthy customers as high end luxuries. ...Henry Ford famously said, 'If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.' | ||||
| Venture capitalists only have two emotions: fear and greed. All their decisions are reached by balancing one against the other. | ||||
| A bad design with a good presentation is doomed eventually. A good design with a bad presentation is doomed immediately. | Akin's 20th Law | |||
| When we enter a board meeting, we only ask two questions. One, are we going to fire the CEO today? If not, then how can we help? | Al Paladino | |||
| An entrepreneur is someone that steals office supplies from home and brings them to work. | Auren Hoffman | |||
| The job candidates who have the best interviewing skills are those who have done it most often. | Bill Neal | |||
| Civilization and profits go hand in hand. | Calvin Coolidge | |||
| An inventor is simply a fellow who doesn't take his education too seriously. | Charles F. Kettering | |||
| If you really want what's best for your customers, you'll never fear competition. Regroup and deliver something better. | Daniel Jalkut | |||
| How do you know a great entrepreneur when you meet one? Great entrepreneurs would do a better job running the competition than their competitors are doing. | David Hornik | |||
| Research is the transformation of money into knowledge. Innovation is the transformation of knowledge into money. | Dr. Geoffrey Nicholson, 3M (inventor of the Post-it) | |||
| Power corrupts. Powerpoint corrupts absolutely. | Edward R. Tufte | |||
| The difference between a good movie and a bad movie is getting everyone to make the *same* movie. | Francis Ford Coppola | |||
| Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without Hell. | Frank Borman | |||
| Committees do harm merely by existing. | Freeman Dyson | |||
| I have never yet met an MBA who cannot analyze a company to the point where it’s clearly not worth investing in. | George Doriot, founder of the first venture capital firm in 1947 | |||
| I'm looking for a lot of men who have an infinite capacity not to know when something can't be done. | Henry Ford | |||
| You cannot make a man worth a given amount by making it illegal for anyone to offer him anything less. You merely deprive him of the right to earn the amount that his abilities and situation would permit him to earn, while you deprive the community even of the moderate services that he is capable of rendering. In brief, for a low wage, you substitute unemployment. You do harm all around, with no comparable compensation. | Henry Hazlitt | |||
| I mean, no matter what else happens, look at the competition and it can't help but inspire optimism. | Henry Vanderbilt | |||
| There are only four ways for a venture investor to exit a deal: IPO, M&A, redemption, or bankruptcy. You can divorce your wife, but you can't divorce us! | Jack Kelly | |||
| Democracies don't make great products. | Jean-Louis Gasseé | |||
| If you decide that you are only going to do things that you know are going to work, you're going to leave a lot of opportunity on the table. Companies are rarely criticized for the things that they failed to try. | Jeff Bezos | |||
| The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. | John Maynard Keynes | |||
| We divide business plans into three categories: candy, vitamins, and painkillers. We throw away the candy. We look at vitamins. We really like painkillers. We especially like addictive painkillers! | Kevin Fong | |||
| Buy to the sound of cannons, sell to the sound of trumpets. | Lord Rothschild | |||
| Entrepreneurship is the last refuge of the trouble making individual. | Mason Cooley | |||
| The fervent belief that saving money and making money are somehow equivalent is the great innovation delusion. | Michael Schrage | |||
| Entrepreneurs have to be comfortable with never having their desk clear at the end of the day. | Pete Petit | |||
| Visionaries make good things happen. Managers keep bad things from happening. For your company to be successful, you need both. Unfortunately, you rarely find them in a single person. | Pete Petit | |||
| Leaders are born; managers can be trained. | Pete Petit | |||
| We trained hard . . . but it seemed everytime we were begining to form up into teams we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to treat any new situation by reorganization and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiences, and demoralization. | Petronius Arbiter, 66 A.D. | |||
| Blaming Wall Street for being greedy is like scolding defensive linemen for being big and aggressive. The people on Wall Street never claimed to be public servants. They took no oath of office. They're in it for the money. We *pay* them to be in it for the money. | P.J. O'Rourke | |||
| I fear FASB is beginning to stand for 'Flatten All Startup Businesses.' | Representative Richard H. Baker (R-La.) | |||
| Never confuse the stock market with the economy. | Ronald Reagan | |||
| People think focus means saying yes to the thing youve got to focus on. But thats not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. | Steve Jobs | |||
| You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give them that. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new. | Steve Jobs | |||
| It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them. | Steve Jobs | |||
| Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It's not about money. It's about the people you have, how you're led, and how much you get it. | Steve Jobs | |||
| Small businesses are independent thinkers. They know they can't compete by imitating the big guys; they have to innovate. So they are less obsessed with earnings than they are with ideas. | Ted Turner | |||
| If financial institutions are deemed too big and too complex to fail, their managers will have an incentive to make them big and complex. | The Economist, August 9, 2008 | |||
| All the gold in California Is in a bank in the middle of Beverly Hills in somebody else's name. So if you dreaming about California, It don't matter at all where you've played before, California's a brand new game. | The Gatlin Brothers | |||
| There are but two ways of paying debt--increase of industry in raising income, increase of thrift in laying out. | Thomas Carlyle | |||
| A business plan should be used as an opportunity to sell your company, not your product. | Tom Crotty | |||
| When you find a fabulous person, hire him (or her)... then figure out where they fit later. | Tom Engdahl | |||
| A large bank always tends to become larger, and a small one tends to become smaller. | Walter Bagehot, 1873 | |||
| Some see private enterprise as a predatory target to be shot, others as a cow to be milked, but few are those who see it as a sturdy horse pulling the wagon. | Winston Churchill | |||
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