Eric Yuan Quotes

You have to be very fast-thinking, creative, and mobile. It is key to making a business move.

I think playing the 5 is an advantage for me. I'm much quicker than a lot of the other centers in our league.

I just challenge the big guys and attack them, and use my quickness to my advantage.

The company that consistently makes and implements decisions rapidly gains a tremendous, often decisive, competitive advantage.

No one holds a permanent speed advantage in the market due to the limits of human intelligence and vision. Your advantage comes from your ability to feel the change faster and take decisive action faster.

To escape the curse of commoditization, a company has to be a game-changer, and that requires employees who are proactive, inventive and zealous.

This is a perverse thing, personally, but I would rather be in the cycle where people are underestimating us. It gives us latitude to go out and make big bets that excite and amaze people.

There's this famous observation that I totally believe: Great startup ideas are the ones that lie in the intersection of the Venn diagram of 'is a good idea' and 'looks like a bad idea.' So you want most people to think it's a bad idea and thus not compete with you until you get giant. But for it to secretly be good.

The successful man is the one who finds out what is the matter with his business before his competitors do.

Move fast. Speed is one of your main advantages over large competitors.

The Future Belongs to Those Who are Fast

Observe, orient, decide, act. It's fighter pilot terminology. If you have the faster OODA loop in a dogfight, you live. The other person dies. In Silicon Valley, the OODA loop of your decision-making is effectively what differentiates your ability to succeed.

It's very important to stay creative and not simply to wait around for people to want you. It's the hardest thing about the business.

If you give the boss all the decision-making power, they see the world through their eyes. The big innovations are generally such a shift that they won't see it. For a long time, it looked like it was just inevitable that you would get slow and bureaucratic.

The opportunity ahead for Microsoft is vast, but to seize it, we must focus clearly, move faster, and continue to transform.

Startups have finite time and resources to find product/market fit before they run out of money. Therefore startups trade off certainty for speed, adopting 'good enough decision making' and iterating and pivoting as they fail, learn, and discover their business model.

I was about 11 or 12 when I started, playing against bigger players. I would use my speed to get out of trouble.

That's been the secret to 'Gas Monkey': Move fast. I opened the first restaurant within a year and a half. Most people wait five years. I always move quickly, and in today's market, no matter what you're in, you can recover from a mistake faster than you can recover from not doing.

You can talk about systems until you're blue in the face but that's secondary - if you're closing down, if you're first to the ball, it doesn't really matter what system you've got.

I just really love being the first to do something and that drives me to think, 'What are people not doing right now, and how can I be the best at it?'

I am fast and I always try to exploit that.

Small businesses are more nimble and innovative than large corporations, and as a result are much more likely to develop the breakthrough ideas we need for global competitiveness.

I fear nothing. I fly around and do things a guy 6-2 and 240 would not do. That gives me an edge.

It's a huge edge, sometime life-saving, to adopt a good idea early and put it into practice.

To gain the competitive edge, companies must master the ability to innovate.