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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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Aaron Levie
Age: 38
Born: 1985
Born: December 27
Entrepreneur
Seattle
Washington
Start
Incumbents
Able
Intentionally
Going
Compete
Solution
Always
Solutions
Building
Full
Small
Incumbent

More quotes by Aaron Levie

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Start with the assumption that the best way to do something is not the way it's being done right now.
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My dad is a chemical engineer, and my mom was a teacher. They were pretty serious about education, but I always thought about things a little bit differently.
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Your product should sell itself, but that does not mean you don't need salespeople.
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Companies have never won. You're always either fighting for survival, or fighting for relevance.
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Innovation in tech favors the naive and the stubborn. If you are too rational you won't tackle problems that others once failed at.
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Startups live at the intersection of existential crisis and everything going perfectly great.
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Tip: Take the stodgiest, oldest, slowest moving industry you can find. And build amazing software for it.
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Modularize, don't customize. Build a platform as opposed to building all of the custom technology and custom vertical experiences.
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Better to be right about the trend and wrong about the implementation, than the other way around.
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Jeff Bezos is opening a retail store and owns a newspaper. Turns out everything we thought about the Internet is wrong.
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The business models in enterprise have changed pretty dramatically. A huge problem with enterprise software traditionally has been usually you sell to the customer and then they adopt the technology. The great thing about 'freemium' and the new way enterprise software is being sold is you get to try it first and then buy it.
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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
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If there could've ever been a magical time to build an enterprise software company, now is absolutely that time.
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Entrepreneurship: 10% coach, 20% player, 30% cheerleader, 40% waterboy.
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Sometimes things are the way they are and can't be changed, other times it's because no one ever tried. Your job is to find the latter.
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It's unfortunate biologically we have to sleep.
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Everything about the enterprise, and then by definition the software the enterprise uses has changed - just in the last 5 years.
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The benefit to building a startup is that customers don't have the same kind of friction when they adopt new technology.
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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.
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Listen to your customers, but don't always build exactly what they're telling you. This is a really key distinction around building enterprise software.
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