“If possible, always own your distribution rather than delegate it to a third party. Nobody cares about selling your product more than you.”
“To the Man (and Woman) in the Arena: “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” —Theodore Roosevelt, 1910”
“What you need on day one is to ratchet up expectations, energy, urgency, and intensity.”
“The late Steve Jobs was only inspired by “insanely great” things. He set a high bar for seemingly everything, and anything that didn’t meet his standards was summarily rejected.”
“Instead of telling people what I think of a proposal, a product, a feature, whatever, I ask them instead what they think. Were they thrilled with it? Absolutely love it? Most of the time I would hear, “It’s okay,” or “It’s not bad.” They would surmise from my facial expression that this wasn’t the answer I was looking for. Come back when you are bursting with excitement about whatever you are proposing to the rest of us.”
In an ill‐advised move, fueled by frustration, I jumped to a start‐up in Holland with some of my college pals. I knew almost immediately that it was a boneheaded move. In hindsight, I was feeling like a caged animal during this period. But in the long run it was helpful, because it broke the trajectory I was on.
“I am not so much focused day‐to‐day on outcomes; I am focused on maximizing the input side of the equation.”
“I got rejected for better deals over and over with the same excuse: you have never run sales. While that was true, I was (in my own estimation) a highly sales‐oriented product person. How would I ever check that box? You don’t just cross over into sales after having been a product person all your career. I led from the front and sold shoulder‐to‐shoulder with sales. These rejections left me with an unfavorable opinion of many venture capitalists who could not recognize talent if it smacked them in the face.”
“We still say, “Architecture matters” at Snowflake; all of our successes at the three companies where I’ve been CEO trace back to superior architecture.”
“Now that we had figured out the formula, we scaled the hell out of the business as fast as the technology roadmap would allow. From $15 million, we went to $45 million, to $125 million, and then to $275 million in annual revenues. I still remember one board meeting when the directors slowly realized we had doubled the size of the entire company inside a quarter. As a hardware platform, Data Domain had product margins in the low 80s, like a software product.”
“Data Domain consumed net venture capital of $28 million from inception, and six years later returned $2.4 billion to shareholders—the magic of combining capital with talent, the essence of economics and capitalism. As a former economics academic, I now had a better appreciation of what I had been studying years ago in Rotterdam.”
“Amazingly, the company had been bootstrapped with only $6–7 million in capital, and it had managed to put $50 million in cash on the balance sheet from operations.”
“The first few weeks of my retirement, in April 2017, were liberating, even euphoric. Not going to work on Monday and not feeling the quarterly gun on my forehead felt awesome. After decades of hard work, I finally had plenty of free time.”
“The biggest difference between younger me and older me is that I am now much quicker to grasp what’s really going on and what needs to happen to amp up an organization. Years ago, I used to hesitate and wait situations out, often trying to fix underperforming people or products instead of pulling the plug. Back then I was seen as a much more reasonable and thoughtful leader—but that didn’t mean I was right. As I got more experience, I realized that I was often just wasting everybody’s time. If we knew that something or someone wasn’t working, why wait? As the saying goes, when there is doubt, there is no doubt.”
“Conversely, you’re not on a mission if you feel like you spend most of your days checking off trivial to‐do items, passing the buck to other people, reading and forwarding email, and covering your ass so you won’t get in any trouble. Showing up every day at a “good enough is good enough” company is the opposite of fun and energizing. Just trying to get through each day is a depressing way to spend a career. And if most people at your company feel that way, the enterprise is in grave danger.”