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Value is generated when the capital required to get a business to sustainability is meaningfully less than what the business is worth when sustainability is reached.

– Fred Wilson

Revolutions are usually made by small networks of agitators rather than by the masses. If you want to launch a revolution, don’t ask yourself, ‘How many people support my ideas?’ Instead, ask yourself, ‘How many of my supporters are capable of effective collaboration?’

– Yuval Noah Harari

We should not stare too much at our big winners. We don’t learn that much from them. We should stare at our big mistakes, because we do learn a lot from them.

– Fred Wilson

Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.

– Bertrand Russell

Most people think of art as learning to draw or some kind of self-expression. But what artists do is learn to see and the actual training is one of observation.

– Ed Catmull

There are no price targets, no return targets, no staking my results on a given outcome for a given company. A goalless process like this is incredibly hard to maintain in an industry which has convinced itself that the passage of three months requires that we get together and retrofit a narrative to explain what was likely pure noise.

– Link

The habit of making decisions whose origins are so heavily weighted with retrospection is part of the process of change itself and part of the forces that shape the future. Rational expectations models so often go astray, in fact, because they are unable to accommodate this dynamic aspect of the process. More important, it is the main reason why surprise is so frequent in its occurrence and so shattering in its impact. Although human beings are always being taken by surprise, we have learned not to be surprised by surprise.

– Peter Bernstein

The company is one of the most amazing inventions of humans, this abstract construct that’s incredibly powerful. Even so, for me, it’s about the products. It’s about working together with really fun, smart, creative people and making wonderful things. It’s not about the money. What a company is, then, is a group of people who can make more than just the next big thing. It’s a talent, it’s a capability, it’s a culture, it’s a point of view, and it’s a way of working together to make the next thing, and the next one, and the next one.

– Steve Jobs

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

– GK Chesterton