Bill Gates quote collection

From this source: http://www.investinganswers.com/education/famous-investors/50-quotes-wealthiest-man-america-3088

1.  "Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one."

2.  "It's fine to celebrate success, but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure."

3.  "Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose."

4.  "We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don't let yourself be lulled into inaction."

5.  "Television is not real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs."

6.  "I really had a lot of dreams when I was a kid and I think a great deal of that grew out of the fact that I had a chance to read a lot."

7.  "I'm a big believer that as much as possible, and there's obviously political limitations, freedom of migration is a good thing."

8.  "If you can't make it good, at least make it look good."

9.  "Of my mental cycles, I devote maybe 10% to business thinking. Business isn't that complicated. I wouldn't want that on my business card."

10. "Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off, and very few employers are interested in helping you. Find yourself."

On Wealth and Investing:

11. "I have $100 billion… You realize I could spend $3 million a day, every day, for the next 100 years? And that's if I don't make another dime…"

12. "Patience is a key element of success."

13. "Is the rich world aware of how four billion of the six billion live? If we were aware, we would want to help out, we'd want to get involved."

14.  "Capitalism is this wonderful thing that motivates people, it causes wonderful inventions to be done. But in this area of disease of the world at large, it's really let us down."

15. "Creative capitalism takes this interest in the fortunes of others and ties it to our interest in our own fortunes in ways that help advance both. This hybrid engine of self-interest and concern for others can serve a much wider circle of people than can be reached by self-interest or caring alone".

16.  "I have drifted away from thinking about these philanthropic things. And it was only as the wealth got large enough and Melinda and I had talked about the view that wealth wasn't something that would be good to just pass to the children."

17.  "I actually thought that it would be a little confusing during the same period of your life to be in one meeting when you're trying to make money, and then go to another meeting where you're giving it away."

18.  (On being the world's richest man) "I wish I wasn't… There's nothing good that comes out of that. You get more visibility as a result of it."

19.  "… No one is less happy than I am with the performance of Microsoft stock! I've lost tens of billions of dollars this year -- if you check, you'll see that's more than most people make in a lifetime!"

On Leadership:

20.  "Technology is just a tool. In terms of getting the kids working together and motivating them, the teacher is the most important."

21.  "As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others."

22.  "Until we're educating every kid in a fantastic way, until ever inner city is cleaned up, there is no shortage of things to do."

23.  "If you think your teacher is tough, wait until you get a boss. He doesn't have tenure."

24.  "If I'd had some set idea of a finish line, don't you think I would have crossed it years ago?"

25.  "We've got to put a lot of money into changing behavior."

26.  "I do think this next century, hopefully, will be about a more global view. Where you don't just think, 'Yes, my country is doing well,' but you think about the world at large."

27.  "There is a certain responsibility that accrued to me when I got to this unexpected position."

28.  "You see, antiquated ideas of kindness and generosity are simply bugs that must be programmed out of our world. And these cold, unfeeling machines show us the way."

On Business Development:

29.  "Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning."

30.  "If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that got 1,000 MPG."

31.  "Intellectual property has the shelf life of a banana."

32.  "If you show people problems and you show people the solutions, they will be moved to act."

33.  "I'm sorry that we have to have a Washington presence. We thrived during our first 16 years without any of this. I never made a political visit to Washington, and we had no people here. It wasn't on our radar screen. We were just making great software."

34.  "The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency."

35.  "This is a fantastic time to be entering the business world, because business is going to change more in the next 10 years than it has in the last 50."

36.  "Whether it's Google or Apple or free software, we've got some fantastic competitors and it keeps us on our toes."

37.  "At Microsoft there are lots of brilliant ideas, but the image is that they all come from the top -- I'm  afraid that's not quite right."

38.  "The Internet will help achieve 'friction-free capitalism' by putting buyer and seller in direct contact and providing more information to both about each other."

39.  "We are always saying to ourselves, 'We have to innovate. We've got to come up with that breakthrough.' In fact, the way software works, so long as you are using your existing software, you don't pay us anything at all. So we're only paid for breakthroughs."

On Computers and Technology:

40.  "The great thing about a computer notebook is that no matter how much you stuff into it, it doesn't get bigger or heavier."

41.  "To create a new standard it takes something that's not just a little bit different. It takes something that's really new and really captures people's imaginations. And the Macintosh, of all the machines I've ever seen, is the only one that meets that standard."

42.  "We're not even close to finishing the basic dream of what the PC can be."

43.  "Windows 2000 already contains features such as the human discipline component, where the PC can send an electric shock through the keyboard if the human does something that does not please Windows."

44.  "I think it's fair to say that personal computers have become the most empowering tool we've ever created. They're tools of communication, they're tools of creativity and they can be shaped by their user."

45.  "When the PC was launched, people knew it was important."

46.  "DOS is ugly and interferes with user experience."

47.  "Software suppliers are trying to make their software packages more user-friendly… Their best approach, so far, has been to take all the old brochures and stamp the words user-friendly on the cover."

48.  "The advance of technology is based on making it fit in so that you don't really even notice it, so it's part of everyday life."

49.  "I'm a great believer that any tool that enhances communication has profound effects in terms of how people can learn from each other and how they can achieve the kind of freedoms that they're interested in."

50.  "The Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow."

Steve Jobs quote collection

From this source:

http://www.investinganswers.com/education/famous-investors/50-quotes-genius-behind-apple-3113

1. "Older people sit down [at a computer] and ask, 'What is it?' But the child asks, 'What can I do with it?'"

2. "It's not about pop culture, and it's not about fooling people, and it's not about convincing people that they want something they don't. We figure out what we want. And I think we're pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That's what we get paid to do."

3. "When I went to school, it was right after the '60s and before this general wave of practical purposefulness had set in... The idealistic wind of the '60s was still at our backs, though, and most of the people I know who are my age have that engrained in them forever."

4. "This revolution, the information revolution, is a revolution of free energy as well, but of another kind: free intellectual energy."

5. "[A computer] takes these very simple-minded instructions -- 'Go fetch a number, add it to this number, put the result there, perceive if it's greater than this other number' -- but executes them at a rate of, let's say, one million per second. At one million per second, the results appear to be magic."

6. "The most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it to a nationwide communications network. We're just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people -- as remarkable as the telephone."

7. "But good PR educates people. That's all it is. You can't con people in this business. The products speak for themselves."

8. "The Web is not going to change the world, certainly not in the next 10 years. It's going to augment the world. And once you're in this Web-augmented space, you're going to see that democratization takes place."

9. "The people who built Silicon Valley were engineers. They learned business, they learned a lot of different things, but they had a real belief that humans, if they worked hard with other creative, smart people, could solve most of humankind's problems. I believe that very much."

10. "It's in Apple's DNA that technology alone is not enough -- it's technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing, and nowhere is that more true than in these post-PC devices."

11. "There's an old Wayne Gretzky quote that I love: 'I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.' And we've always tried to do that at Apple. Since the very, very beginning. And we always will."

12. "We've had one of these before, when the dot-com bubble burst. What I told our company was that we were just going to invest our way through the downturn, that we weren't going to lay off people, that we'd taken a tremendous amount of effort to get them into Apple in the first place -- the last thing we were going to do is lay them off."

13. "I'm convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance."

14. "A lot of companies have chosen to downsize, and maybe that was the right thing for them. We chose a different path. Our belief was that if we kept putting great products in front of customers, they would continue to open their wallets."

15. "The minute I dropped out (of college) I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting."

16. "I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life. "

17. "Much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on."

18. "I was lucky -- I found what I loved to do early in life."

19. "Woz (Steve Wozniak) and I started Apple in my parents' garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees."

20. "You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers."

21. "Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do."

22. "For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: 'If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?' And whenever the answer has been 'No' for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something."

23. "Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."

24. "Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life."

25. "Don't be trapped by dogma -- which is living with the results of other people's thinking."

26. "Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice."

27. "My job is to make the whole executive team good enough to be successors, so that's what I try to do."

28. "And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."

29. "Apple's goal isn't to make money. Our goal is to design and develop and bring to market good products… We trust as a consequence of that, people will like them, and as another consequence, we'll make some money. But we're really clear about what our goals are."

30. "We did not enter the search business. [Google] entered the phone business. Make no mistake they want to kill the iPhone. We won't let them."

31. "I thought deeply about this. I ended up concluding that the worst thing that could possibly happen as we get big and as we get a little more influence in the world is if we change our core values and start letting it slide, I can't do that. I'd rather quit."

32. "I want to put a ding in the universe."

33. "I've always wanted to own and control the primary technology in everything we do."

34. "Design is not just what it looks like and feels like, design is how it works."

35. "You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new."

36. "Why join the navy if you can be a pirate?"

37. "Be a yardstick of quality, some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected."

38. "Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower." 

39. "Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations."

40. "I'm the only person I know that's lost a quarter of a billion dollars in one year.... It's very character-building."

41. "I'm as proud of what we don't do as I am of what we do."

42. "Quality is more important than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles."

43. "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."

44. "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."

45. "Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?"

46. "Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn't matter to me… Going to bed at night saying we've done something wonderful… that's what matters to me."

47. "I was worth over $1 million when I was 23, and over $10 million when I was 24, and over $100 million when I was 25, and it wasn't that important because I never did it for the money."

48. "My job is not to be easy on people. My job is to make them better."

49. "People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully."

50. "I mean, some people say, 'Oh, God, if [Steve Jobs] got run over by a bus, Apple would be in trouble.' And, you know, I think it wouldn't be a party, but there are really capable people at Apple."

Management and Teaching

Management is like teaching, in many ways.  Let's consider a few quotes on the subject of teaching and think about how it relates to managing in your business.

“Tell me and I'll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I'll understand.”

Chinese Proverb “The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.”  William Arthur Ward “The greatest sign of success for a teacher... is to be able to say, "The children are now working as if I did not exist."”  Maria Montessor Never try to teach a pig to sing; it doesn't work, and it annoys the pig. Robert Heinlein, American science fiction writer

What separates the top 10% of startup CEOs from the rest?

That great question was asked on Quora recently and here's the best answer from Robert Scoble:

I've interviewed thousands of CEOs and some things that stand out to me:

1. Good at hiring AND firing. Whenever you find a really great CEO you find someone who has a knack for hiring. That means selling other people on your dream or your business. Especially when it doesn't seem all that important or seems very risky. I used to work for a CEO who was awesome at hiring, but couldn't fire anyone. Doomed the business. Many of the best CEOs get others to follow no matter what.
2. Builds a culture, not just a company. The best CEOs, like Tony Hsieh at Zappos, build a culture that gives everyone a mission. They stand out in a sea of boring companies.
3. Listens and acts. Many CEOs want to tell you what they are doing, but the best ones listen to feedback, and, even, do something with that feedback. My favorites even give credit back. Mike McCue, CEO of Flipboard, tells audiences that I was responsible for a couple of key features.
4. Is resilient. AirBnB took 1,000 days for its business to start working. Imagine if they gave up on day 999? The best CEOs find a way to dig in and keep going even when it seems everything is going against them.
5. Has vision. Let's be honest. There are a lot of nice CEOs but if you don't have the ability to build a product that matters to people, then no one will remember your name. Can you see a way to make billions with wearable computers? I guarantee some can and they are the CEOs who will bring me interesting new products.
6. Stays focused. A friend who worked for Steve Jobs told me that what really made him different is that Jobs wouldn't let teams move off their tasks until they really finished them.
7. Speaks clearly. A great CEO is clear, crisp, concise. Quotable. So many people just aren't good at telling a story in a way that's easy to remember. The best are awesome at this. Since it's the CEO's job to tell the company's story, it's extremely important that this person be able to clearly tell a story about the company and the product.
8. Is a customer advocate. The best CEOs understand deeply what customers want and when they are making anti-customer choices.
9. Good at convincing other people. CEOs have to deal with conflicting interest groups. Customers often want something investors don't. So, a good CEO is really great at convincing other people to get on board, even at changing people's opinions.

Extra credit if you are:

• Nice. Yeah, Steve Jobs wasn't always nice. But he was an exception in many ways. People remember assholes and try to avoid them. That's not something that's easy to work around.
• A builder. Yeah, you can be a CEO if you aren't a builder, but you are swimming up stream. It's one reason I haven't run my own business. The CEOs that seem to work the best are ones who COULD write some code, or build a new design using a 3D printer.
• Integrity. The best CEOs are survivors and it's really hard to survive if you have dirt in your closet or treat people differently behind closed doors than you do in public.

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So, my question is:  Integrity is LAST on the list?  And only "extra credit"?  It seems to me that it ought to be first on the list, a basic requirement.

You can find more discussion on this issue of what characteristics distinguish the top startup CEOs from the rest at this link.   And if you aren't into Quora, please tell me why?

Email, and the elusive Zero Inbox

From one of my favorite blogs, zenhabits, some thoughts on what works for the author Leo Babauta:

The email habits that work for me:

1. Limited email processing times. I don’t keep email open all day, nor do I open it frequently. I have come to peace with the idea that I can let email pile up to 20-30 messages and my world won’t collapse, nor will it be difficult to process to empty. Note that I call it “email processing time”, not “email reading time” — I open my email and process to empty, instead of just reading things and leaving them in the inbox.
2. Take action. When I open an email, I make a quick decision: delete/archive, act now (if it takes a minute or two) and then reply/archive, send a quick reply (and then archive), add to my todo list to do later (and star and then archive). In none of those cases is the email left sitting in the inbox.
3. Immediately add things to the calendar. One of my best habits is to open up my calendar immediately whenever there’s a date from an email that I need to remember. If someone wants to meet or Skype or do a workout, it goes on the calendar. If I need to follow up on something next week, it goes on the calendar. It’s automatic now, and so I rarely ever forget anything.
4. Keyboard shortcuts. I use Gmail, which has a great set of shortcuts for processing email. I spent a few minutes learning them, and if you consciously use them, soon they become muscle memory. The key ones for me: ‘gi’ to go back to the inbox, ‘a’ for archive, Shift-3 to delete, ‘c’ for compose, ‘r’ for reply, ‘f’ for forward, ‘a’ to reply to all, ‘gs’ to go to my starred messages, Tab Return when I’m composing a message to send and archive it. I also have it set to go to the next message in the inbox after I delete or archive a message, rather than going back to the inbox, so I quickly process from top to bottom.
5. Keep emails short. I usually reply with 1-3 sentences. It’s rare that I will send a message longer than 5 sentences, and if I do, I have to really justify it to myself. If something needs to be written in longer form, I’d prefer to open a new Google Doc, write it up, and share it with the person (docs are better for sharing, collaborating, editing, reading). Keeping emails short means it’s quick to reply, and the other person doesn’t have to wade through an essay to get the key information.
6. Quick todo list adding. An email inbox isn’t a great todo list, because 1) your todos are mixed in with all kinds of other things, making it hard to figure out what needs to be done; 2) the subject lines of emails don’t often contain the actual action needed, so you have to remember what needs to be done when you scan your subject lines; and most importantly, 3) as you are checking your todo list (your inbox), other messages come in to demand your attention, and so you’re always distracted. Better is to keep a simple text document. I use Launchbar to append text to my todo list, so adding a todo item is a matter of a few keystrokes. That makes it effortless, which means I can quickly form a nice list without the distractions of an inbox.
7. Keep only unread emails in inbox. This one is for advanced users only, but I have hacked my Gmail inbox so that only unread emails are in my inbox. What this means is that if I read an email and don’t act on it, it disappears from my inbox. That forces me to act now, or I will lose the email to the ether. This is built-in motivation to actually process the email, and in practice this helps you keep your inbox empty. 
8. Bookmark or read later. Often someone will send me something to read (something they’ve written or an article they like). I will open the link, then bookmark it to read later, or add to Instapaper to read later. That way I don’t spend a ton of time in email because I have a lot of reading to do.
9. Filter ruthlessly. When an email appears in my inbox that I don’t need to see, and it’s likely that it will happen again, I will hit “unsubscribe”, or immediately create a filter so it won’t come into my inbox again. This drastically reduces my emails. I’m ruthless about it, and will even apply it to people who bother me.
10. Close email when done. When I’ve processed my email as much as I can, I close it. I don’t need to open it again until hours later, if at all.

If your inbox is really full, here’s how to clear it out quickly: for to-dos that are in your inbox, star them, put them on a to-do list, and archive. Archive and delete others, make some quick replies, put everything else in a “to-read” or “to-process” folder if you need to. Now you have an empty inbox that you can keep empty with the habits in this article.

Mentors: the value of, and why NOT investor/mentors

Fred Wilson, one of my favorite VCs, is seen on the video clip below (skip to 8:44) discussing why a mentor is so important to startups, and why it's important to have a mentor other than the investor.

The video link is http://youtu.be/L-mLXvaGUxw