In the early days of a startup, people's compensation is whatever you negotiate with a founder and it's all over the place.

No matter what you choose, build stuff and be around smart people.

You can create value with breakthrough innovation, incremental refinement, or complex coordination. Great companies often do two of these. The very best companies do all three.

Founders are usually very stingy with equity to employees and very generous with equity to investors. I think this is totally backwards.

Obsess about the quality of the product.

In general don't start a startup you're not willing to work on for ten years.

Everyone starting a startup for the first time is scared, and everyone feels like a bit of an imposter.

No growth hack, brilliant marketing idea, or sales team can save you long term if you don't have a sufficiently good product.

You have to be decisive. Indecisiveness is a startup killer.

Execution gets divided into two key questions: 1) can you figure out what to do and 2) can you get it done.

If you don't need it yourself, and you're building something that someone else needs, realize you're at a big disadvantage.

I wanted to write the most beautiful poem but that is impossible the world has written its own.

Only the foolish would think that wisdom is something to keep locked in a drawer. Only the fearful would feel empowerment is something best kept to oneself, or the few, and not shared with all.

I never trusted anybody at all. I don't know why it was so hard, I just didn't.

Slumps in life are like soft beds. They're easy to get into and hard to get out of.

The discovery and investigation of life on other planets is likely to change many of our ideas about how life arose on the Earth and even what is life and its natural development.

I'm not promoting myself as the next great American driver, as some people are describing me. If that's what people want to call me, fine. But I've got more important things to focus on.

I changed the mindset at Canon by getting people to realize that profits come first.

When I can't handle events, I let them handle themselves.

You drove a dagger through my back, Elena. It hurt.

People are resilient. After all, every person born has recovered from nine months on life support.