Community organizing is all about building grassroots support. It’s about identifying the people around you with whom you can create a common, passionate cause. And it’s about ignoring the conventional wisdom of company politics and instead playing the game by very different rules.
Entrepreneurs say in an economic boom it’s actually hard to build a company because everybody’s too excited and there is too much money funding too many marginal companies.
When I was first started, when I was eighteen, I wrestled for a company that had a very hardcore fanbase and demanded a lot from its wrestlers. So, every single match, I would do every move possible. I would land on the concrete floor; I would land really high on my head just to try to impress the fans.
Facebook’s data trove is enviable, and its moves into nearly every aspect of our lives – from payment to media, will create even more of it. The company also has created a huge base of developers for its platform, but the ecosystem is incomplete compared to vertically integrated OSes like iOS, Mac or Windows.
I love doing third albums. A group makes its first album, and then the record company rushes them into the studio to make their second album. After that, they go, ‘Whoa, wait a second.’ They get a little more confident. They step back and say, ‘Okay, now we’re gonna do it.’
There’s always an opportunity with crisis. Just as it forces an individual to look inside himself, it forces a company to reexamine its policies and practices.
Blackheart Records being 25 years old represents staying power and the fact that we weren’t able to get a record out through conventional means, so we had to create this record company to put out our records if we wanted to be a band that had records to give out to their fans.
Engel & Volkers is unlike any other real estate company I have known and I am proud to be part of an organization that raises the bar to such high levels.
Customer discovery is the process of translating a founder’s vision for the company into hypotheses about each component of the business model and creating a set of experiments to test each hypothesis.
We are a company for the people, please get involved. Be part of the conversation.
A company is only as good as the people it keeps.
I really felt that ‘Three’s Company’ was a gift. When it ended, I had money in the bank and had the luxury to pursue a life that meant something, to learn and discover.
Integrity is essential and irreplaceable. It is the most valuable asset for a person, a company, or a society seeking to build and progress.
If we could muster the same determination and sense of responsibility that saves a country like Japan – or a company like Xerox – then investing to save women and children who are dying in the developing world would be very good business.
A record company used to be a very good thing, but they ended up soul-destroyingly trapping people in the accounting department. And you couldn’t get any further, and the heads of each department were changing all the time, so you couldn’t have any permanent relationship within the corporation.
My dream as a producer is to be able to build a company that can be a safe haven for artists, for directors and for writers and actors to do what they do best and let them have final edit. I’d like to build something to that effect.
When you start to automate, you start to do the self-driving thing, you make it much more efficient. When these cars go into self-driving, you start to become a robotics company.
It’s interesting – a lot of what you accomplish in your lifetime either as an individual or as a company is determined by other people. I mean, you can do interview after interview and defend a point of view, but more often than not, the collective kind of opinion will be the one viewed historically and taken as gospel.
I started in investment banking at Allen & Company in 1991. It was the go-go days of media mergers, and we were incredibly busy with one deal after another. Unlike typical investment banking groups, even in the midst of merger mania, we didn’t have a formal face-time culture – and I felt empowered by that.
If a company is second rate, the logo will eventually be perceived as second rate. It is foolhardy to believe that a logo will do its job immediately, before an audience has been properly conditioned.
The great gift of conversation lies less in displaying it ourselves than in drawing it out of others. He who leaves your company pleased with himself and his own cleverness is perfectly well pleased with you.
It never occurred to me that I’d have a dance company.
Acknowledging someone is an act of altruism in the first place, so converting that act of altruism into a pizza party or company fleece jacket or a gift card is fine, but it’s not in keeping with spirit in which it all began.
Recently, I was asked if I was going to fire an employee who made a mistake that cost the company $600,000. No, I replied, I just spent $600,000 training him. Why would I want somebody to hire his experience?
In 2000, when my partner Ben Horowitz was CEO of the first cloud computing company, Loudcloud, the cost of a customer running a basic Internet application was approximately $150,000 a month.
I see myself as the buffer between the band and the record company.
What’s important is that you build your company to be able to capture the opportunity as it comes.
What has always made IBM a fascinating and compelling place for me is the passion of the company, and its people, to apply technology and scientific thinking to major societal issues.
It’s not about charisma and personality, it’s about results and products and those very bedrock things that are why people at Apple and outside of Apple are getting more excited about the company and what Apple stands for and what its potential is to contribute to the industry.
When you are in an international camp, you are together for 10 days. You eat three times a day together. You spend a lot of time in each other’s company. That 10 days is very important ,and I think even times for training, times when you eat, meetings, this that and the other, a lot has got to change in that camp.
Uniqlo as a company has always developed new fabrics and is always trying to be innovative. The design is simple, so the fabric is important.
Why are we here? I think many people assume, wrongly, that a company exists solely to make money. Money is an important part of a company’s existence, if the company is any good. But a result is not a cause. We have to go deeper and find the real reason for our being.
The Sixties – I had to have my foot in everything then. I’m doing the same thing now but through an intermediary. You know. The food company. Maybe that’s the way to go about it. You go right straight into the inferno, and when you get older, you pull back.
You got to be careful of the company you keep.
I am excited to join the Workday Board at an exciting time in the company’s growth and look forward to leveraging my past experience as a technologist and entrepreneur to provide advice as they continue to look at new areas of growth.
Most businesses think that product is the most important thing, but without great leadership, mission and a team that deliver results at a high level, even the best product won’t make a company successful.
Generally, you want to raise capital either when you have to or when it’s really easy. If the company desperately needs money, and they can’t figure out any other way, then they need to raise money. Or if someone’s offering you easy money on good terms, you should take it because you can use it for good things.
The price of a commodity will never go to zero. When you invest in commodities futures, you’re not buying a piece of paper that says you own an intangible piece of company that can go bankrupt.
If you’re puzzled by what dark energy is, you’re in good company.
When a big company lays you off, they often give you a year’s salary to ‘go pursue a dream.’ If you’re stupid, you panic and get another job. If you’re smart, you take the money and use the time to figure out what you want to do next.
If it’s one thing we do really well as a company, it’s that we take big change slowly and deliberately and bring the community along with us.
Years and years ago, I did a game based on ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide’ with a company called Infocom, which was a great company. They were doing witty, intelligent, literate games based on text.
Nothing kills your company’s culture like layoffs.
If the government wants to do social policy, it should not be done in a quasi-public company. If you have a mortgage guarantee company which is done by the U.S. government, it should be guaranteed by the originators, i.e., the shareholder.
I think Yahoo is a great company, with great assets.
What’s the word to describe the thing that all of us are trying to do, which is to found or work for or invest in a company that is the winner of all winners?
If you are lonely when you’re alone, you are in bad company.
Forget luxury; as a great company you have to keep evolving.
Every company has two organizational structures: The formal one is written on the charts; the other is the everyday relationship of the men and women in the organization.
It is far better to be alone, than to be in bad company.
Everyone has their own greatness. Whether you reach your own greatness depends on your environment, your structure, the company you keep and your attitude.
