I’ve been on a run of books recently and rolled through this one in a few days. Like most books about the early days of massive companies, it’s hard for it to be a bad read, and there were some good takeaways as I think about the future. It wasn’t a life-changer, but it was a great way to spend several hours.
Big Takeaway
Focus — insanely specific, concentrate focus — is monumental to success, whether institutionally or individually. It’s going to be difficult and emotional and you’re definitely going to pay a high cost. It’s worth it.
Favorite Quotes
• When you start a company, what you’re really doing is getting other people to latch on to an idea.
• Almost everything I ever learned about being a leader, I learned with a backpack on.
• Real innovation comes not from top-down pronouncements and narrowly definted tasks. It comes from hiring innovators focused on th ebig picture who can orient themselves within a problem and solve it without having their hand held the whole time. Loosely coupled but tightly aligned.
• I love negotiation, and I’m pretty good at it. In large part this is because it’s easy for me to identify with other people’s needs.
• The truth is that for every good idea, there are a thousand bad ones. And sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference.
• Culture is a reflection of who you are and what you do — it doesn’t come from carefully worded mission statements. Culture isn’t what you say. It’s what you do.
• A culture of freedom and responsibility, coupled with radical honesty, worked like a charm.
• Radical honesty is great until it’s aimed at you.
• When your dream becomes a reality, it doesn’t just belong to you. It belongs to the people who helped you — your family, your friends, and your co-workers. It belongs to the world.
• If people want what you have, they will break down your door, leap over broken links and beg you for more. If they don’t want what you’ve got, changing the color palette won’t make a damn bit of difference.
• Nobody knows anything.
• As you get older, if you’re at all self-aware, you learn two important things about yourself: what you like, and what you’re good at. Anyone who gets to spend his day doing both of those things is a lucky man.
• Canada Principle — We could expand into Canada, but doing so would require resources that could better and more efficiently be used elsewhere.
• When it comes to making your dream a reality, one of the most powerful weapons at your disposal is dogged, bullheaded insistence.
• My dream was building things. My dream was the process of making Netflix (not Netflix itself).
• The only real way to find out if your idea is a good one is to do it. You’ll learn more in one hour of doing something than in a lifetime of thinking about it.
• Everyone is aligned when the wind is blowing the right way. It’s when a storm comes up that all of a sudden it becomes apparent that people have different goals and objectives.
• You have to learn to love the problem, not the solution. That’s how you stay engaged when things take longer than you expected.