Top 100 Biz Stone Quotes
#1. I believe that the open exchange of information can have a positive global impact.
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#3. Your goals should be bigger than your ego,
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#4. Investors are employees you can never hire. We made sure to pick investors that thought like us.
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#5. In a job where you're on a computer all day, and we cater lunch and we put snacks in the kitchen, well, we all started gaining weight, even though we try to pick healthy stuff, but inevitably you find the cashews.
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#6. I was writing and developing software for alumnae to be able to connect and communicate.
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#7. Essentially, you become a top tweet because so many people are engaging with that tweet. They're either retweeting it, or they're favoriting it; they're doing one of many things to indicate to us that that tweet is interesting and engaging to users.
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#8. I'm still kinda old-school. We're twittering, and we're all twitterers. And we write tweets. The only thing I don't love is twits.
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#9. The international limit on mobile texting, or SMS, is 160 characters. We wanted Twitter to be entirely readable and writable on every single one of the over five billion mobile phones on this planet, because they all have SMS built in. So we said it has to be within 160 characters, all the tweets.
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#10. I thought about tennis. But the more I thought about the whole thing - lessons, equipment, going to the courts - I said screw it, I'm just going to go buy a pair of sneakers and go running.
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#11. You can provide a short-format content, and it can grow, and it can spread virally across the entire Twitter system, and it can contain within it a link to something that's much longer, that's a long essay or that's a video.
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#12. We can figure it out, it's not like we all have a disease.
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#13. Timing, perseverance, and ten years of trying will eventually make you look like an overnight success.
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#14. The reason I really started running was for meditative purposes. I would pick some problem to have in my head while running.
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#15. At least half the job of CEO is communication - because of human nature. People fear what they don't know. If the board wasn't hearing that things were going well, they assumed that things must be going badly.
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#16. The smallest, earliest gifts forever alter your trajectory for doing good. This is what I mean by the compound interest of altruism. Start early to maximize the compound interest in your efforts.
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#17. Trust your instincts, know what you want, and believe in your ability to achieve it.
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#18. I got an idea: people like news why don't we write the news down on a piece of paper, and we'll gas them up and drive them to everyone's house. I mean, if you were going to say that now, it doesn't sound like a great idea, because there are other ways you can distribute the news.
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#19. The normal press cycle is to put a company on a pedestal and then knock it down. It's much more interesting that way.
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#20. Understand that you dont have all the answers, you just have to start somewhere and keep an open mind.
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#21. I love Sherlock Holmes, but I love any of these old stories where the writer was paid by the word, so the adventures just continue forever. They are almost like they were meant to be read out loud.
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#22. I thought I was going to stay at Google, because it was a great place to work.
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#23. We actually created Twitter and Odeo at the same time. When we realized we didn't really want to be running Odeo anymore we looked around for anyone who wanted to buy Odeo, but not acquire us as a technology. But people aren't as interested in that.
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#24. Twitter provides a great amount of timely information, but we still need those people to fill out the rest of the story and the context.
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#25. Inventing your dream is the first and biggest step toward making it come true.
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#26. People first. Technology second.
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#27. My personal view about how people should use Twitter is less relevant than our goal to provide the infrastructure for a new kind of communication and then support the creativity that emerges.
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#28. The ability to listen,watch and draw lessons from obvious and unlikely places breeds originality and growth
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#29. I'm curious about writing in the age of online publishing. Because nobody cares about good writing online.
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#30. I mean just look at haiku, the idea of it. We want to focus on that singularity, on that simplicity, but we still want to add features and add value, but we want to do it in a way that fits in with that mentality of simplicity. You have to spend a lot of time thinking about it.
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#31. I'm convinced that there's a new way to define capitalism, and that the definition should include three ingredients - that we love our work, that we are building a traditionally successful business, and that we are having some positive impact in the world, whether it's local or global.
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#32. The determination that led me to create a new sports team taught me an important lesson: opportunity is manufactured.
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#33. When I studied graphic design, I learned a valuable lesson: There's no perfect answer to the puzzle, and creativity is a renewable resource.
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#34. When a plane lands in the Hudson and there's a Twitter user on the ferry taking a picture of it, Boom. That's it. The water is still splashing. Here's the photo of the thing.
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#35. The thing that excites me, and the thing that excited me about Twitter, is the idea of a flock of birds moving around an object in flight.
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#36. I think it's a really big deal to be able to meet people outside the context of something like a conference room or someplace where everything feels like it's formal talk.
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#37. Our promise was to deliver value before profit, ...
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#38. Failure was part of the path. It was worth the risk. In fact, it was a critical component of growth. By sharing it with our users, we were showing our ultimate confidence in ourselves and our success. We weren't quitting, and we hoped our faith would inspire theirs.
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#39. I think when people twitter 20 or 30 times per day, that's too much. They are boxing everyone else out, and people stop following them because they need a break.
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#40. Doing startups is all about making mistakes.
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#41. Both my wife and I have a lot of compassion for animals in general.
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#42. Constraint inspired creativity. Blank spaces are difficult to fill, but the smallest prompt can send us in fantastic new directions
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#43. Plain hard work is good and important, but it is ideas that drive us, as individuals, companies, nations, and a global community. Creativity is what makes us unique, inspired, and fulfilled.
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#44. We did Twitter, and Twitter grew so fast, and in 2006 we spun it out into Twitter, Inc.
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#45. A Twitter update is simple and fast and gets the information and news, and it spreads it very quickly, and it can contain links so you can then link to this whole context of information.
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#46. Embrace your constraints. They are provocative. They are challenging. They wake you up. They make you more creative. They make you better,
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#47. I started out as an artist, and I continue to think of myself as an artist first, and a technologist and entrepreneur after that.
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#48. Everything I've done, I've made up. Some of that might have been right; most of it was probably wrong.
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#49. This idea that the open exchange of information can have a positive global impact is being proven over and over again around the world nearly on a daily basis - and for Secretary Clinton to recognize that, I think, is a huge step.
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#50. I'd dropped out of college to start design thing.
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#51. There's no such thing as a superhero, but together we can world in a new direction.
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#52. Hell yeah! Twitter was proof that leaderless self-organizing systems could be true agents of change.
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#53. I realized that a company can build a business, do good in society, and have fun. These three goals can run alongside one another, without being dominated by the bottom line.
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#54. If you take an idea and just hold it in your head, you unconsciously start to do things that advance you toward that goal.
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#55. If people are passionate about your product, whether it's because they're hating or loving it, those are both good scenarios.
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#56. The most rewarding thing for me has been this affirmation for me that people are basically good and smart, and if you give them a simple tool that allows them to exhibit that behavior, they'll prove it to you every single day.
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#57. Embrace constraint. What you get in return is the art and craft of editing your own life, weeding out what is and isn't necessary.
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#58. We can break news really fast. When an earthquake happens, there are people Twittering about it.
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#59. I think we definitely want to focus on the simplicity aspect because it's something that's built into the culture even here at Twitter. Constraints inspire creativity.
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#60. It's important to credit the brave people that take chances to stand up to regimes. They're the star.
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#61. I never even graduated college. I never finished learning, as it were, and I have a psychological need to be in a learning environment at all times.
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#62. You have to have an emotional investment in what you're doing. If you don't love what you're doing, failure is pretty much guaranteed.
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#63. Obviously, working at Google wasn't a mistake. I used to just walk around. I don't know if I was supposed to, but I'd just open doors and see what people were doing.
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#64. Balancing family and work is a top priority for me, and I treat it as such. Meaning, I actually put specific family time and events in my calendar so that precious time is dedicated and properly blocked off from any work that may try to sneak its way into my schedule.
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#65. You curate information that you want to receive. It's a lot different because I'm not asking you if it's okay, I'm just saying I'm following your updates. That's why I don't think of Twitter as a social network.
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#66. I think Twitter has brought something totally new to the table.
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#67. If I had one piece of advice to tell an entrepreneur, I always say, 'You have to have emotional investment in what you're working on.' That's what we lacked at Odeo.
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#68. When you think about Twitter, there are people all around the world reporting twenty-four seven, every second. They're reporting what they're seeing and what's happening around them. So there's a lot of potential for breaking news.
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#69. Have confidence in your ideas before they even exist,
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#70. With Twitter, it's as easy to unfollow as it is to follow.
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#71. If this book were limited to 140 pages, it would end here.
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#72. We lacked something that is the key to a successful startup, and it was bigger than sound quality. It was emotional investment. If you don't love what you're building, if you're not an avid user yourself, then you will most likely fail even if you're doing everything else right.
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#73. I've probably overused this analogy of a flock of birds moving around an object in flight, but, in reality, it's so simple, real time communication of individuals that allow for this super organism type of organism to happen.
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#74. I've seen people twitter in haiku only.
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#75. We didn't have anything before Twitter that allowed a group of people roaming around a city to communicate instantly, in real time, and in a coordinated way, in a group.
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#76. Even though running is physically straining, it's mentally refreshing. Especially when you feel like you've accomplished something.
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#78. Think about your work situation. Do you treat your creativity like a fossil fuel - a limited resource that must be conserved - or have you harnessed the unending power of the sun? Are you in an environment where creativity thrives? Is there room for new ideas every day? Can you make room?
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#79. The future of marketing is philanthropy,
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#80. Creativity comes from constraint.
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#81. For me, I've learned about what it means to focus on a culture, to build social responsibility, and the idea of a company as a super-organism.
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#82. A personal belief is that if you're not personally invested in what you're working on, you'll fail.
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#83. Positive culture comes from being mindful, and respecting your coworkers, and being empathetic.
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#84. You have to think for an email. What's the subject? What's it about? It takes two seconds to think about that. So you have to think, Is this a work thing or a social thing? Which? Then you get into a situation that you don't want to be in, because then people are thinking about it too much.
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#85. Fear in the absence of knowledge breeds irrationality.
We should always seek knowledge, even in the face of fear.
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#86. I think of Twitter as a messaging system that you didn't know you needed until you had it. Think about when cell phones first started coming out. People said, "Why would I carry my phone around?" And now you'll drive back to your house thirty miles if you forget your cell phone.
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#87. Willingness to take risks is the path to success.
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#88. If you're thinking of acquiring a company and want to keep it a secret, tell everyone in the company; let them all in on the truth. Say, 'Listen, if this gets out, we'll probably lose the deal, so we're all in this together.'
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#89. I mean, even when it's really simple, there's so much amazing beautiful creativity that can come out of that.
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#90. You can shut down a service, and yet people will find ways to communicate.
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#91. There's a lot of social input when you put these things out there. People's ideas cross with other people's thoughts.
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#92. I realized ceativity is a renewable resource. You never run out of good ideas
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#93. When you hand good people possibility, they do great things.
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#94. Even the simplest tools can empower people to do great things.
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#95. We hired a CSR person at Twitter, years before we hired our first sales person, to make sure we had a culture and impact of doing good.
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#96. ...It doesn't pay to act bulletproof. Nobody is flawless and when you act as if you are, it always rings false.
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#97. I knew Mac pretty well. I'd used them when I was younger.
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#98. In order to succeed spectacularly you have to be willing to fail spectacularly.
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#99. If you make the opportunity. you'll be the first in the position to take advantage of it.
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#100. At Twitter, mobile is in our DNA ... For us, it's all about mobile, and it always has been.
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