Jessica Livingston Quotes

#1. Even though it seems like it's big business and impersonal, and "they" take care of it, it really isn't. There is no "they." It always comes down to an "I" of somebody, and in many cases, it's a principal.

Jessica Livingston

#2. Finding a programmer to work with if you don't already know one will be a challenge. Merely judging if a programmer is exceptional vs. competent will be very hard if you are not one yourself. When you do find someone, work together informally for a while to test your compatibility.

Jessica Livingston

#3. The really dramatic growth happens when a startup only has three of four people, so only three or four people see that, whereas tens of thousands see business as it's practiced by Boeing or Philip Morris.

Jessica Livingston

#4. Livingston: I know it was your sixth company, but was there anything that you found you were better at? Greenspun: I think I was probably mostly worse at things than I thought. The VCs had a point when they said people remember how you made them feel more than what you said.

Jessica Livingston

#5. Starting a startup is a process of trial and error. What guided the founders through this process was their empathy for the users. They never lost sight of making things that people would want.

Jessica Livingston

#6. Etermination is the most important quality in a founder, open-mindedness and willingness to change your idea are key, and all startups face rejection at first.

Jessica Livingston

#7. Paul Buchheit: Then you have what we do with PCs, and that's technically pretty challenging - to take this big network of machines that are unreliable and build a big, reliable storage system out of it.

Jessica Livingston

#8. You've got to say you are a step ahead of where you actually are to move to the step that you want to be at.

Jessica Livingston

#9. I think business at all costs is just wrong. I think there are certain things that you just don't do, and that acting with integrity and decency in business to me is just a given. I simply don't compromise on those things.

Jessica Livingston

#10. Cofounders will endure so much together that their relationship is often compared to a marriage.

Jessica Livingston

#11. Programmers have not been professionals because they haven't really cared about quality.

Jessica Livingston

#12. When you build only software that you absolutely need, you don't get more software than you'll actually use.

Jessica Livingston

#13. The first business plan is there to make sure you can use Microsoft Word.

Jessica Livingston

#14. I think there are very few people who have a capacity to see the future. So it can be difficult when you are talking about something where nothing about it exists yet.

Jessica Livingston

#15. I didn't really want to patent it because, for one, I don't like software patents, and, two, if you patent it, you make it public. Even if you don't know someone's infringing, they will still be getting the benefit. Instead, we just chose to keep it a trade secret and not show it to anyone.

Jessica Livingston

#16. Investors, most of them, have a herd mentality. They want to invest only if other people are investing

Jessica Livingston

#17. The less energy people expend on performance, the more they expend on appearances to compensate.

Jessica Livingston

#18. A lot of the machines that Google is built on - commodity is the polite word for them - they're regular PCs and so they're not always the most reliable.

Jessica Livingston

#19. It was just a few million bucks to take us out of our misery, to pay off our loans.

Jessica Livingston

#20. People like the idea of innovation in the abstract, but when you present them with any specific innovation, they tend to reject it because it doesn't fit with what they already know.

Jessica Livingston

#21. Some famous person said, "Success is 50 percent luck and 50 percent preparedness for that luck." I think that's a lot of it. It's being ready to take advantage of opportunities when they arise.

Jessica Livingston

#22. Steve did a prepayment on royalties to make sure we had the resources to stay in business,

Jessica Livingston

#23. Pick a big enough project, something that's really hard, something that over the years you can work on.

Jessica Livingston

#24. Innovations seem inevitable in retrospect, but at the time it's an uphill battle.

Jessica Livingston

#25. Over the years, I've learned that the first idea you have is irrelevant. It's just a catalyst for you to get started. Then you figure out what's wrong with it and you go through phases of denial, panic, regret. And then you finally have a better idea and the second idea is always the important one.

Jessica Livingston

#26. Finding a technical cofounder would have been difficult for me. I was an English major and didn't know any computer programmers.

Jessica Livingston

#27. The media often glamorizes successful founders and makes their paths seem easier than they actually were.

Jessica Livingston

#28. The one thing we learned over 5 years is that nothing works better than just improving your product.

Jessica Livingston