Best 19 quotes of Jessica Livingston on MyQuotes

Jessica Livingston

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    Jessica Livingston

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

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    Jessica Livingston

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

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    Jessica Livingston

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

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    Jessica Livingston

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

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    Jessica Livingston

    Lots of people were skeptical, but that's always true when you do something that hasn't been done before.

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    Jessica Livingston

    My skills weren't that I knew how to design a floppy disk, I knew how to design a printer interface, I knew how to design a modem interface; it was that, when the time came and I had to get one done, I would design my own, fresh, without knowing how other people do it. That was another thing that made me very good. All the best things that I did at Apple came from (a) not having money, and (b) not having done it before, ever. Every single thing that we came out with that was really great, I'd never once done that thing in my life.

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    Jessica Livingston

    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.

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    Jessica Livingston

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

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    Jessica Livingston

    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.

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    Jessica Livingston

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

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    Jessica Livingston

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

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    Jessica Livingston

    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.

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    Jessica Livingston

    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.

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    Jessica Livingston

    ..determination 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.

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    Jessica Livingston

    Paul Buchheit: I'm suddenly reminded that, for a while, I asked people if they were playing Russian Roulette with a gun with a billion barrels (or some huge number, so in other words, some low probability that they would actually be killed), how much would they have to be paid to play one round? A lot of people were almost offended by the question and they'd say, "I wouldn't do it at any price." But, of course, we do that everyday. They drive to work in cars to earn money and they are taking risks all the time, but they don't like to acknowledge that they are taking risks. They want to pretend that everything is risk-free.

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    Jessica Livingston

    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.

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    Jessica Livingston

    The goal - at least the way I think about entrepreneurship - is you realize one day that you can't really work anyone else. You have to start your own thing. It almost doesn't matter what the thing is. We had six different business plan changes, and then the last one was PayPal. If that one didn't work out, if we still had the money and the people, obviously we would not have given up. We would have iterated on the business model and done something else. I don't think there was ever clarity as to who we were until we knew it was working. By then, we'd figured out our PR pitch and told everyone what we do and who we are. But between the founding and the actual PayPal, it was just like this tug-of-war where it was like, "We're trying this, this week." Every week you go to investors and say, "We're doing this, exactly this. We're really focused. We're going to be huge." The next week you're like, "That was a lie.

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    Jessica Livingston

    The goal - at least the way I think about entrepreneurship - is you realize one day that you can't really work anyone else. You have to start your won thing. It almost doesn't matter what the thing is. We had six different business plan changes, and then the last one was PayPal. If that one didn't work out, if we still had the money and the people, obviously we would not have given up. We would have iterated on the business model and done something else. I don't think there was ever clarity as to who we were until we knew it was working. By then, we'd figured out our PR pitch and told everyone what we do and who we are. But between the founding and the actual PayPal, it was just like this tug-of-war where it was like, "We're trying this, this week." Every week you go to investors and say, "We're doing this, exactly this. We're really focused. We're going to be huge." The next week you're like, "That was a lie.

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    Jessica Livingston

    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.