BUSINESS

Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.

If you want a friend on Wall Street, get a dog.

Find a business you understand, with a dominant market position, where management has high integrity. That's it. That's the whole strategy.

Your brand is what people say about you when you are not in the room.

If you double the number of experiments you do per year, you're going to double your inventiveness.

Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.

My goal was never to just create a company. A lot of people misinterpret that as if I do not care about revenue or profit or any of those things. But what not being just a company means to us is building something that actually makes a really big difference in the world.

Make a grand slam offer so good people feel stupid saying no.

If you give away your secrets, the people who would steal them were never going to buy anyway. The people who buy want you to implement the secrets for them.

You do not need more information. You need more action on the information you already have.

The goal is not to be liked. The goal is to be useful.

Never mistake movement for progress. Busyness is the enemy of building.

Your competition is not your enemy. Your competition is your best teacher.

I would rather have a business doing $1M a year with no investors than a startup raising $10M that I do not control.

Business is a sprint and a marathon. You have to pace yourself but also know when to run.

Cybersecurity is the biggest business opportunity of the next decade. Every breach headline is a sales call.

I don't care about your feelings. I care about your numbers.

Know what you're good at and stop doing everything else.

I'm not Mr. Wonderful because I'm nice. I'm Mr. Wonderful because I tell you the truth.

There's no such thing as a good partner. I want the whole thing or nothing.

The easiest way to make money is to create something of such value that everybody wants it and go out and give it to them.

Revenue is vanity, profit is sanity, cash flow is reality.

Your pricing is a signal of your confidence and your expertise. Undercharging doesn't make you humble — it makes you broke.

A successful business is not the one that makes the most money. It's the one that keeps the most money.

Build personal wealth separate from your business. Your company is an asset, not your retirement plan.

Don't just invest in businesses. Learn to operate them. The best investors understand what it takes to actually run something.

Culture compounds just like capital. Good culture builds value over decades. Bad culture destroys it faster than any financial mistake.

Open source is not charity. It's the most effective go-to-market strategy ever invented for enterprise software.

Data is the new oil is a terrible analogy. Oil is valuable because it's scarce. Data is valuable because it's abundant.

Every company is becoming a data company whether they like it or not. We just make it less painful.

Separating storage from compute sounds like a technical detail. It's actually a business model revolution.

Growth is oxygen. Without growth, you are slowly asphyxiating.

Data sharing between organizations will be bigger than data warehousing itself. We're building the connective tissue of the data economy.

Free viewers was the most important product decision we ever made. When everyone can see the work, everyone cares about design.

Adobe paying a billion-dollar breakup fee and Figma keeping the money is the most expensive compliment anyone has ever received.

Our free tier isn't a marketing gimmick. It's a belief that everyone deserves access to good design tools regardless of budget.

We sold 20,000 flamethrowers in four days. The merchandise business has a better margin than the tunnel business right now.

We fund our own R&D. If the product doesn't work, we lose our money, not the taxpayer's. That alignment changes everything.

Everyone was fighting over New York and LA. We went to the suburbs. Turns out, that's where most of America actually lives.

Advertising at the moment of purchase intent is the most valuable real estate in marketing. We own that moment for groceries.

Uber was the villain. We were the hero. Turns out the hero still needs a business model.

We stayed in the US and Canada while Uber went to 70 countries. Focus isn't glamorous, but it's how you survive.

Being the nice guys in ride-sharing got us a lot of goodwill and about 28% market share. The market rewards ruthlessness more than kindness.

When Uber handed us their Southeast Asian business, it wasn't generosity. They were bleeding $700 million a year in the region and we weren't stopping.

We're not competing with DoorDash or Instacart. We're their future delivery infrastructure. We replace the driver, not the app.

The last mile is the most expensive mile in logistics. Robots don't need tips, don't call in sick, and don't double-park.

Pinterest is the only place on the internet where the ads are actually the content people came for. Nobody goes to Pinterest to avoid seeing products.

A thousand true fans is all you need. You don't need millions of followers. You need a thousand people willing to pay $10 a month.

We were profitable at the unit level from almost the beginning. The reason it took so long to show on the P&L is we were reinvesting everything into growth.

We turned down $23 billion from Google. Then we accepted $32 billion. The $9 billion difference was basically a really expensive negotiation tactic.

SaaS vendors have pricing data from thousands of deals. Buyers have pricing data from one — their own. We fix that imbalance.

In a recession, every company needs to cut software costs. In a boom, every company is buying more software and overpaying. We win in both markets.