Famous Quotes & Sayings

Jessica Livingston Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 38 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Jessica Livingston.

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Famous Quotes By Jessica Livingston

Jessica Livingston Quotes 1911099

Livingston: Some aspects of business turned out to be less of a mystery than you had thought. What did you find you were better at than you thought? Graham: I found I could actually sell moderately well. I could convince people of stuff. I learned a trick for doing this: to tell the truth. A lot of people think that the way to convince people of things is to be eloquent - to have some bag of tricks for sliding conclusions into their brains. But there's also a sort of hack that you can use if you are not a very good salesman, which is simply tell people the truth. Our strategy for selling our software to people was: make the best software and then tell them, truthfully, "this is the best software." And they could tell we were telling the truth. Another advantage of telling the truth is that you don't have to remember what you've said. You don't have to keep any state in your head. It's a purely functional business strategy. (Hackers will get what I mean.) — Jessica Livingston

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Finding a technical cofounder would have been difficult for me. I was an English major and didn't know any computer programmers. — Jessica Livingston

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Etermination is the most important quality in a founder, open-mindedness and willingness to change your idea are key, and all startups face rejection at first. — Jessica Livingston

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Programmers have not been professionals because they haven't really cared about quality. — Jessica Livingston

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The first business plan is there to make sure you can use Microsoft Word. — Jessica Livingston

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Paul Buchheit: I'm suddenly reminded that, for a while, I asked people if they were playing Russian Roulette with a gun with a billion barrels (or some huge number, so in other words, some low probability that they would actually be killed), how much would they have to be paid to play one round? A lot of people were almost offended by the question and they'd say, "I wouldn't do it at any price." But, of course, we do that everyday. They drive to work in cars to earn money and they are taking risks all the time, but they don't like to acknowledge that they are taking risks. They want to pretend that everything is risk-free. — Jessica Livingston

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The goal - at least the way I think about entrepreneurship - is you realize one day that you can't really work anyone else. You have to start your won thing. It almost doesn't matter what the thing is. We had six different business plan changes, and then the last one was PayPal.
If that one didn't work out, if we still had the money and the people, obviously we would not have given up. We would have iterated on the business model and done something else. I don't think there was ever clarity as to who we were until we knew it was working. By then, we'd figured out our PR pitch and told everyone what we do and who we are. But between the founding and the actual PayPal, it was just like this tug-of-war where it was like, "We're trying this, this week." Every week you go to investors and say, "We're doing this, exactly this. We're really focused. We're going to be huge." The next week you're like, "That was a lie. — Jessica Livingston

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Over the years, I've learned that the first idea you have is irrelevant. It's just a catalyst for you to get started. Then you figure out what's wrong with it and you go through phases of denial, panic, regret. And then you finally have a better idea and the second idea is always the important one. — Jessica Livingston

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You've got to say you are a step ahead of where you actually are to move to the step that you want to be at. — Jessica Livingston

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Finding a programmer to work with if you don't already know one will be a challenge. Merely judging if a programmer is exceptional vs. competent will be very hard if you are not one yourself. When you do find someone, work together informally for a while to test your compatibility. — Jessica Livingston

Jessica Livingston Quotes 2270107

In big companies, there's always going to be more politics and less scope for individual decisions. But seeing what startups are really like will at least show other organizations what to aim for. The time may soon be coming when instead of startups trying to seem more corporate, corporations will try to seem more like startups. That would be a good thing. — Jessica Livingston

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Pick a big enough project, something that's really hard, something that over the years you can work on. — Jessica Livingston

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Starting a startup is a process of trial and error. What guided the founders through this process was their empathy for the users. They never lost sight of making things that people would want. — Jessica Livingston

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Paul Buchheit: Then you have what we do with PCs, and that's technically pretty challenging - to take this big network of machines that are unreliable and build a big, reliable storage system out of it. — Jessica Livingston

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I think there are very few people who have a capacity to see the future. So it can be difficult when you are talking about something where nothing about it exists yet. — Jessica Livingston

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Even though it seems like it's big business and impersonal, and "they" take care of it, it really isn't. There is no "they." It always comes down to an "I" of somebody, and in many cases, it's a principal. — Jessica Livingston

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Livingston: I know it was your sixth company, but was there anything that you found you were better at? Greenspun: I think I was probably mostly worse at things than I thought. The VCs had a point when they said people remember how you made them feel more than what you said. — Jessica Livingston

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I think business at all costs is just wrong. I think there are certain things that you just don't do, and that acting with integrity and decency in business to me is just a given. I simply don't compromise on those things. — Jessica Livingston

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I didn't really want to patent it because, for one, I don't like software patents, and, two, if you patent it, you make it public. Even if you don't know someone's infringing, they will still be getting the benefit. Instead, we just chose to keep it a trade secret and not show it to anyone. — Jessica Livingston

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The less energy people expend on performance, the more they expend on appearances to compensate. — Jessica Livingston

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Innovations seem inevitable in retrospect, but at the time it's an uphill battle. — Jessica Livingston

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Investors, most of them, have a herd mentality. They want to invest only if other people are investing — Jessica Livingston

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My skills weren't that I knew how to design a floppy disk, I knew how to design a printer interface, I knew how to design a modem interface; it was that, when the time came and I had to get one done, I would design my own, fresh, without knowing how other people do it. That was another thing that made me very good. All the best things that I did at Apple came from (a) not having money, and (b) not having done it before, ever. Every single thing that we came out with that was really great, I'd never once done that thing in my life. — Jessica Livingston

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Cofounders will endure so much together that their relationship is often compared to a marriage. — Jessica Livingston

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So we said, "OK, we'll do Apple Computer." In those days there was no money yet in this microcomputer business, and big experienced companies and investors, analysts-those kind of people, that are trained in business and much smarter than we were-they didn't think that this was going to be a real big market. They thought it was going to be a little hobby thing, like home robots or ham radios, that a few techie people would get into and really it wasn't going to go to the masses. — Jessica Livingston

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First of all, try to have the highest of ethics and to be open and truthful about things, not hiding. If you have to hide something for company reasons, at least explain what you're doing. Don't mislead people. Know in your heart that you are a good person with good goals because that will carry over to your own self-confidence and your belief in your engineering abilities. Always seek excellence: make your product better than the average person would. — Jessica Livingston

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The really dramatic growth happens when a startup only has three of four people, so only three or four people see that, whereas tens of thousands see business as it's practiced by Boeing or Philip Morris. — Jessica Livingston

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People like the idea of innovation in the abstract, but when you present them with any specific innovation, they tend to reject it because it doesn't fit with what they already know. — Jessica Livingston

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When you build only software that you absolutely need, you don't get more software than you'll actually use. — Jessica Livingston

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It was just a few million bucks to take us out of our misery, to pay off our loans. — Jessica Livingston

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Steve did a prepayment on royalties to make sure we had the resources to stay in business, — Jessica Livingston

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A company that is not designed to create high-tech products is very unlikely to have the culture or the DNA that it takes to create high-tech products. So if you are a high-tech person in that company, then you're basically a glorified typist in some sense. It's very unlikely that the kind of people who would be successful in an entertainment company would even understand what programmers do that makes them more than typists. — Jessica Livingston

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A lot of the machines that Google is built on - commodity is the polite word for them - they're regular PCs and so they're not always the most reliable. — Jessica Livingston

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Wozniak: Well, we added up to the total everything that was needed. If there was anything that neither one of us knew how to do, Steve would do it. He'd just find a way to do it. He was just gung ho and pressing for this company to be successful. And me, I was pretty much only in my technical head with the circuits. — Jessica Livingston

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The media often glamorizes successful founders and makes their paths seem easier than they actually were. — Jessica Livingston

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Livingston: Why did users like Viaweb? Graham: I think the main thing was that it was easy. Practically all the software in the world is either broken or very difficult to use. So users dread software. They've been trained that whenever they try to install something, or even fill out a form online, it's not going to work. I dread installing stuff, and I have a PhD in computer science. So if you're writing applications for end users, you have to remember that you're writing for an audience that has been traumatized by bad experiences. We worked hard to make Viaweb as easy as it could possibly be, and we had this confidence-building online demo where we walked people through using the software. That was what got us all the users. — Jessica Livingston

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Some famous person said, "Success is 50 percent luck and 50 percent preparedness for that luck." I think that's a lot of it. It's being ready to take advantage of opportunities when they arise. — Jessica Livingston

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The one thing we learned over 5 years is that nothing works better than just improving your product. — Jessica Livingston