Joe Maristela > Joe's Quotes

“ I know you think you understand what you thought I said but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant”
― Alan Greenspan

“There are errors in this book. I do not know where they are. If I did they wouldn't be there. But with close to two hundred thousand words my probabilistic mind tells me some are wrong.”
― Alan Greenspan, The Age of Turbulence

“The Journal called the memo the “Peanut Butter Manifesto,” because in it, Garlinghouse complains, “We lack a focused, cohesive vision for our company. We want to do everything and be everything—to everyone. We’ve known this for years, talk about it incessantly, but do nothing to fundamentally address it. We are scared to be left out. We are reactive instead of charting an unwavering course. We are separated into silos that far too frequently don’t talk to each other. And when we do talk, it isn’t to collaborate on a clearly focused strategy, but rather to argue and fight about ownership, strategies and tactics.… “I’ve heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular. “I hate peanut butter. We all should.”
― Nicholas Carlson, Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!

“Yang believed Microsoft made ugly, bad products. Its besuited culture was so the opposite of Yahoo’s.”
― Nicholas Carlson, Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!

“Finally, the memo said that Yahoo was full of employees who were “lacking the passion and commitment to be a part of the solution. We sit idly by while—at all levels—employees are enabled to ‘hang around.’ Where is the accountability? Moreover, our compensation systems don’t align to our overall success. Weak performers that have been around for years are rewarded. And many of our top performers aren’t adequately recognized for their efforts.”
― Nicholas Carlson, Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!

“Widely admired by the public at large, Mayer has many enemies within her industry. They say she is robotic, stuck up, and absurd in her obsession with detail. They say her fixation with the user experience masks a disdain for the moneymaking side of the technology industry. Then there is her inner circle, full of young, wildly loyal men and women.”
― Nicholas Carlson, Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!

“Someone even suggested the insane idea that Google should scan all the libraries in the world and put every book ever written online. But no one laughed the idea off. They started to think about how it could be done.”
― Nicholas Carlson, Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!

“Thompson announced that Yahoo was going to sue Facebook over patent infringement. The move deeply embarrassed both the engineers at Yahoo, who thought that kind of behavior was for trolls, and the media people at Yahoo who depended on traffic partnerships with Facebook to build audiences.”
― Nicholas Carlson, Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!

“Coleman came to Yahoo from Reader’s Digest and had been in publishing for twenty-five years. When he got to Yahoo, he would laugh a lot because he believed there were so many simple things he could do to get the business growing. For starters, he could hire salespeople who actually knew buyers in the companies they were trying to sell ads to. Yahoo didn’t have that before.”
― Nicholas Carlson, Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!

“Even simpler: He could hire reps who knew how to use the phone to sell ads, rather than just take orders over email. Yahoo didn’t have that before.”
― Nicholas Carlson, Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!

“By a “product person,” Loeb and Wolf meant someone who could get teams of engineers and designers to build software tools that consumers find useful, addictive, or fun. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was this kind of executive. So was Apple cofounder Steve Jobs.”
― Nicholas Carlson, Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!

“One day, Jerry Yang sat down for an interview with Doug Levy, a former journalist who had become well known for his tech-industry coverage in USA Today. Levy was no longer a member of the media. He was working as an independent media consultant and he’d figured out a good gig. He would go into a company and interview its executives as though he were going to write an article. Then he’d prepare a critical piece and let them read it. The idea was to show them where the company’s holes were.”
― Nicholas Carlson, Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!

“Pay-Pal.” People wrote down “payments.” He said “Google.” People wrote down “search.” He said “eBay” and they wrote “auctions.” After a few more companies, he said “Yahoo.” He collected the thirty pieces of paper on Yahoo. Everybody had a different word. What was Yahoo trying to be? No one inside the company knew anymore.”
― Nicholas Carlson, Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!

“One problem with the discipline of marketing is that everyone knows enough about it to make suggestions, but most don’t know enough to offer good advice.”
― Eric M. Jackson, Paypal Wars

“Companies holding broad patents and trial lawyers specializing in class actions must have seen easy money when they looked at Paypal, and without laws to discourage frivolous lawsuits there was nothing to deter them.”
― Eric M. Jackson, The PayPal Wars: Battles with eBay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth

“Law enforcement generally seems a step behind in fighting online crime; if your customers are at risk, evidently you'll need to protect them yourself, and if the Russian mafia targets your company, you're the one who's going to have to defend it.”
― Eric M. Jackson, The PayPal Wars: Battles with eBay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth

“[...] government regulation will continue to pose a risk to PayPal into the foreseeable future.”
― Eric M. Jackson, The PayPal Wars: Battles with eBay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth

“Lingering fraud and regulatory problems aside, the post-integration PayPal is certainly better positioned now than it was during its starry-eyed startup days to revolutionize money transfers and wrest control of currencies away from corrupt governments.”
― Eric M. Jackson, The PayPal Wars: Battles with eBay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth

“The regulatory system turned out to be perhaps the greatest obstacle for our young business. Once PayPal became a publicly traded company, regulators seemed willing to pursue their own agendas whenever the laws were murky.”
― Eric M. Jackson, The PayPal Wars: Battles with eBay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth

“Schumpeter chose the term "creative destruction" to describe the introduction of new innovations into the economy for a reason—as the case of PayPal shows, it's a strife-filled process. A half-dozen startup competitors were quick to follow PayPal's lea before eBay got in on the act. And that's just representatives of the so-called new economy. The fact that many banks either entered the online payments market directly or lobbied for regulations against it showed that the old guard was not prepared to go silently into the night.”
― Eric M. Jackson, The PayPal Wars: Battles with eBay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth

“Eroom’s law—that’s Moore’s law backward—observes that the number of new drugs approved per billion dollars spent on R&D has halved every nine years since 1950.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“CREATIVE MONOPOLY means new products that benefit everybody and sustainable profits for the creator. Competition means no profits for anybody, no meaningful differentiation, and a struggle for survival.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“All Rhodes Scholars had a great future in their past.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Tolstoy opens Anna Karenina by observing: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Business is the opposite. All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Redistribution through immigration postpones the problem but does not dispense with the need for a new type of regulation: a social state with progressive taxes on income and capital. One might hope, moreover, that immigration will be more readily accepted by the less advantaged members of the wealthier societies such institutions are in place to ensure that the economic benefits of globalization by everyone. If you have free trade and free circulation of capital and people but destroy the social state and all forms of progressive taxation, the temptations of defensive nationalism and identity politics will very likely grow stronger than ever in both Europe and the United States.”
― Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty First Century

“It is a curious thing, Harry, but perhaps those who are best suited to power are those who have never sought it. Those who, like you, have leadership thrust upon them, and take up the mantle because they must, and find to their own surprise that they wear it well.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

“Golden Krishna, an expert in user experience who currently works on design strategy at Google, astutely pointed out during one of our conversations that the only people who refer to their customers as “users” are drug dealers—and technologists.”
― Manoush Zomorodi, Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive & Creative Self

“Human resources are like natural resources; they're often buried deep. You have to go looking for them, they're not just lying around on the surface. You have to create the circumstances where they show themselves.”
― Ken Robinson

“We recruit for attitude and train for skill,”
― Atul Gawande