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Uber is a $3.5 billion lesson in building for how the world *should* work instead of optimizing for how the world *does* work

Aaron Levie

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Aaron Levie
Age: 38
Born: 1985
Born: December 27
Entrepreneur
Seattle
Washington
Lessons
Instead
Building
Doe
Optimizing
Work
Uber
World
Billion
Lesson
Billions

More quotes by Aaron Levie

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My downtime tends to resemble my uptime. Weekends are workdays, but toned down. Over the whole weekend, I may have five meetings, as opposed to six on a weekday. I used to play piano for 30 minutes at night, but I had to pull that out of my schedule. I don't have time for nonwork stuff.
Aaron Levie
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The only way to avoid disruption is to constantly do what you would if you were just starting out.
Aaron Levie
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The 10% between 90% done to 100% done takes most of the time, causes most of the stress, but is all of the value.
Aaron Levie
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All we're really doing is repeating technologies that were tried 10, 20, 30 years ago... it's just that it was too expensive, too unusable, and we didn't have the enabling technologies to make it possible.
Aaron Levie
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I'm obsessed with speed. I'm always asking myself, 'Why can't we do things faster? Why can't it happen more efficiently? Why is this requiring three meetings instead of one?'
Aaron Levie
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The product that wins is the one that bridges customers to the future, not the one that requires a giant leap.
Aaron Levie
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Do things that incumbents can't or won't do because it's economically or technically infeasible.
Aaron Levie
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If you don't go to every level of your company, you distance yourself from the marketplace and from your people.
Aaron Levie
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The only barrier to entry you can create is to consistently build a great product.
Aaron Levie
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I think I'm the kind of person who would be very difficult to employ - I'm pretty annoying, but driven.
Aaron Levie
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We're going from a world of customized software to standardized platforms.
Aaron Levie
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That's already been tried before only means the first attempt got it wrong.
Aaron Levie
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Look for new enabling technologies that create a wide gap between how things have been done and how they can be done.
Aaron Levie
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You intentionally start small, because you will not be able to compete with an incumbent... because the incumbent is always going to go for the full solution.
Aaron Levie
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Tip: Take the stodgiest, oldest, slowest moving industry you can find. And build amazing software for it.
Aaron Levie
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I think people are always able to achieve more than they think they can. While that’s cliche, I don’t know if managers think about that enough. You have to set your sights extremely high.
Aaron Levie
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When you're doing something you're passionate about, stress becomes a featurenot a bug.
Aaron Levie
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I'm certainly not into money and prestige. For me there is simply nothing more exciting than people involved in the creation of great products. That is what drives me.
Aaron Levie
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Startups live at the intersection of existential crisis and everything going perfectly great.
Aaron Levie
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Entrepreneurship: 10% coach, 20% player, 30% cheerleader, 40% waterboy.
Aaron Levie