Jack said, 'Well, what do you know about PayPal?' – his response, 'I don't know anything about PayPal'. Jack then said, 'Okay, you're hired, we want you to be the CEO of Ali Pay!'
— Brian A. Wong“One major overhead entrepreneurial business often grapple with is the exorbitant rent in cities. Moving to a smaller town offers a significant reduction in these costs and promotes regional economic balance.”— Sridhar Vembu
Founder and CEO of Zoho Corporation, cloud computing company
The quote archive
Wisdom in fragments
A growing archive of 3,000+ moments, drawn from every interview.
Jack Ma encouraged the entire company to practice and learn Tai Chi in their free time, it is a practice that allows one to embrace the seeming contradictions in the world, and in business. Let me give you some examples – how do you become a profitable business while also doing good for society?
— Brian A. WongWhen China started its open-door policy, 40 years ago, it was a much different environment. There was nothing to work with! It was a communist system before that, a planned economy, no free market. People started building things from scratch.
— Brian A. WongMarkets are good at things that have prices, but certain things cannot have prices. Whenever you have situations where you can't have prices, it's not a question of a missing market, it's that you cannot fundamentally construct this market, and this is when government intervention is required.
— Albert WengerPartner at Andreessen Horowitz, early Bitcoin and cryptocurrency advocate
We need to get out of the peacetime footing that we are on and we need to get onto a wartime footing against this climate crisis. During World War II, the US allocated 50% of GDP roughly to fighting, and I believe we need to get to 50% of GDP sustained over 5 to 10 years.
— Albert WengerPartner at Andreessen Horowitz, early Bitcoin and cryptocurrency advocate
We are now trapping in the Earth's atmospheric oceanic system dangerous amounts of greenhouse gases which is equal to four Hiroshima sized nuclear bombs per second. Imagine if we had alien spaceships hovering above earth, dropping four Hiroshima nuclear bombs into our atmosphere every second. What would we do? We would drop everything until we got rid of them.
— Albert WengerPartner at Andreessen Horowitz, early Bitcoin and cryptocurrency advocate
The real scarcity today is attention to the importance of the question, to what end are we deploying this capital. The knowledge age economy is aspirational and that is where I believe we should aim for as we are clearly not there yet. We are in a limbo now, an interregnum phase and this is when everything is particularly unsettling.
— Albert WengerPartner at Andreessen Horowitz, early Bitcoin and cryptocurrency advocate
On a personal level, the best defense against materialism and greed is to give money away. You need to be charitable, engage in philanthropy.
— Mike EvansNFL Wide Receiver for Tampa Bay Buccaneers & Super Bowl Champion
When your business becomes a unicorn and heads for the stratosphere, there's a temptation to slide into the primary activity of the business being turning capital, and so customer focus can get lost. Once you stop putting customer first, the competition will destroy you.
— Mike EvansNFL Wide Receiver for Tampa Bay Buccaneers & Super Bowl Champion
Every business makes money as a secondary purpose. It's the coincidental result of creating customer value and changing the world in some way that people are willing to pay for and find valuable.
— Mike EvansNFL Wide Receiver for Tampa Bay Buccaneers & Super Bowl Champion
The only real competitive advantage that's durable is cost and innovation – as long as innovation happens along the trajectory that takes into account stakeholders, not just shareholders.
— Mike EvansNFL Wide Receiver for Tampa Bay Buccaneers & Super Bowl Champion
The difference between a miserable, crank grump and an entrepreneur? Both are unhappy- but the entrepreneur says they can make it better… that they can fix it… and they follow the spark.
— Mike EvansNFL Wide Receiver for Tampa Bay Buccaneers & Super Bowl Champion
All we can control in this life is our dedication, our self-belief, our determination. I can guarantee you, I will always have that, and that's my legacy. That's what I want to leave as a gift to my kids – the message that they should never give up, never have regrets, to give everything.
— Francis NgannouFormer UFC Heavyweight Champion & Mixed Martial Arts Pioneer
The reason why I fight is that I'm fighting against the pain of seeing my family get sick and fighting against not being able to help them. That's more painful than anything. To see my kids, get sick tomorrow and not being able to help them? That's more painful than anything I would experience in a fight.
— Francis NgannouFormer UFC Heavyweight Champion & Mixed Martial Arts Pioneer
If you fail many times in life, it can be frustrating, but, if you look differently at that, you can see that if you fail many times, you get up many times. If you didn't get up after the first fall, you could never have fought. Failure just means you got knocked down.
— Francis NgannouFormer UFC Heavyweight Champion & Mixed Martial Arts Pioneer
Everyone has a little bit of warrior in them. We all grow up and have a little piece of us which wants to be a superhero, who goes and fights the bad guys. In real life, fighting is tough, you have to overcome your fears – nobody really wants to get into a fight! Escaping that fear is the reason so many people who get into combat sports.
— Francis NgannouFormer UFC Heavyweight Champion & Mixed Martial Arts Pioneer