You shouldn't focus on why you can't do something, which is what most people do. You should focus on why perhaps you can, and be one of the exceptions.
In the end, a vision without the ability to execute it is probably a hallucination.
You have to get along with people, but you also have to recognize that the strength of a team is different people with different perspectives and different personalities.
All great ideas start as weird ideas. What now seems obvious, early on, is not obvious to anybody.
The pace of change and the threat of disruption creates tremendous opportunities.
You can be entrepreneurial even if you don’t want to be in business. You can be a social entrepreneur focused on the not-for-profit sector. You can be an agriculture entrepreneur if you want to change how people think about farming. You can be a policy entrepreneur if you want to go into government. The idea of an entrepreneur is really thinking out of the box and taking risks and stepping up to major challenges.
You're not just trying to do something marginally, incrementally better. You're doing something that is a fundamental paradigm shift, that will have exponential impact. That means it's harder to do, but ultimately, if it's successful, the impact it has is far greater.
Having a great idea is important. But having a great team is also important.
It's not about how to get started; it's about how to get noticed.
At the end of the day, the team you build is the company you build.
It's stunning to me what kind of an impact even one person can have if they have the right passion, perspective and are able to align the interest of a great team.
Anything is possible if you put your mind to it and you really work hard.
I want to find people who have had to work hard and who have learned from their failures. Perseverance is no guarantee you’ll succeed, but without it, it’s almost guaranteed you won’t.
The idea of an entrepreneur is really thinking out of the box and taking risks and stepping up to major challenges.
If you're doing something new you've got to have a vision. You've got to have a perspective. You've got to have some north star you're aiming for, and you just believe somehow you'll get there, which kind of gets to the passion point.
It's stunning to me what kind of an impact even one person can have
And I'd say one of the great lessons I've learned over the past couple of decades, from a management perspective, is that really when you come down to it, it really is all about people and all about leadership.
So my degree was in political science, which I think was - the closest I could come to marketing is politics.
You really need to believe that you are on to something important.
I think it took us nine years to get one million subscribers to AOL, and then in the next nine years we went from one million to 35 million.
If you really got the right people, and you've got them working together as a team, whether it's in business, whether it's in science, whether it's in politics, you can make a big difference.
I do think that a general liberal arts education is very important, particularly in an uncertain changing world
So you have to force yourself out of a comfort zone and really try to figure out what are the key ingredients, the key skill sets, the key perspectives that are necessary, and then figure out a way to attract the very best people to fill those particular roles.
I enjoyed high school and college, and I think I learned a lot, but that was not really my focus. My focus was on trying to figure out what businesses to start
If you can build a company and make money, great. But eventually, my intention is to give all my money away. I told my kids that. [Wealth] is not particularly helpful to kids. It's almost a burden. It's better to allow them to do their own thing and have their own successes.
