Hubert Burda Quotes

Jeff Bezos was one of those best and brightest who came to N.Y. to work in finance. He didn't need to know anything about retail bookselling to start Amazon.

The greatest companies in the world were started and are run by fanatics.

I have tremendous admiration for companies with the kind of pioneering spirit and innovation eBay has demonstrated from day one.

When Gates was active in business, he was the smartest - so focused that no company could surpass Microsoft.

Travis Kalanick was and is the perfect person to lead Uber, a product I knew from day one was going to be big.

Booksellers initially thought of Amazon as their best friend. They were coming in, and they were challenging Barnes and Noble, and Borders, which were the big, dominant corporations of the day, and that they would disrupt them and make them less powerful, but they could never envision that Amazon would overtake them all.

Zuckerberg rejected $2 billion for Facebook and has successfully created a company worth nearly $200 billion.

Amazon has well passed any expectations of its ability to change distribution and marketing.

We can learn from IBM's successful history that you don't have to have the best product to become number one. You don't even have to have a good product.

The Priceline Group is a truly globally-scaled digital e-commerce Fortune 500 company operating world-class brands. I look forward to contributing to the Group by identifying new opportunities and operating synergies that enhance its already strong track record as a global digital pioneer.

A man, to carry on a successful business, must have imagination. He must see things as in a vision, a dream of the whole thing. A man can cultivate this faculty only by an appreciation of the finer things in life.

The best start-ups might be considered slightly less extreme kinds of cults. The biggest difference is that cults tend to be fanatically wrong about something important. People at a successful start-up are fanatically right about something those outside it have missed.

Most of what we've done at SurveyMonkey is create a market, which I would say is much harder than trying to enter a market that already exists. But if you get it right, it can become a great business.

You've got to admire Sir Richard Branson. He is a completely different style of businessman to me, but you have got to admire what he has achieved.

Wal-Mart's success strategies and tactics are easy to understand yet hard to duplicate.

I'd rather Apple cannibalize Apple than somebody else cannibalize Apple.

Our international success started out first because we became the No. 1 casual wear brand in our home market of Japan. Then, we set up stores in the world's major fashion centers of New York, Paris and London.

Market leadership can translate directly to higher revenue, higher profitability, greater capital velocity, and correspondingly stronger returns on invested capital.

When you look at a company that's already succeeded or is at the very top of its game, it isn't necessarily when it's executing well. It tends to be peacetime - you've defeated the competition, you have the highest margins, the highest multiple.

I know the rewards of focusing on innovation and outcomes as opposed to hours. I've been fortunate to work with brilliant entrepreneurs who didn't have years of experience, and yet they changed the world.

If we can become the de facto standard for image capture of unique perspectives around the world, we have a lot of growth ahead of us.

The companies that can afford to do basic research (and can't afford not to) are ones that dominate their markets. … It's cheap insurance, since failing to do basic research guarantees that the next major advance will be owned by someone else.

The trick to playing Steve Jobs? I don't know.

Great innovators like Thomas Alva Edison, Henry Ford, and Andrew Carnegie didn't rely on government. There was hardly any of it in those days. More recently, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Larry Ellison used genius to put brand-new ideas into production.

I think few people in their lifetime have the chance to be involved in something like the creation of Microsoft - that's always going to be something I'm known for.