Aaron Levie Quotes

It's important to have people who will say to you that you're really off the beaten track.

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.

By definition, startups are not constrained by the limits of established company culture. And so they push boundaries and develop new technologies and ways of doing things.

We've got to be entrepreneurial; we've got to be innovative, and we've got to figure out ways of getting things done that people might think are very unorthodox.

Any schemes - such as 'think of symmetry laws', or 'put the information in mathematical form', or 'guess equations'- are known to everybody now, and they are all tried all the time. When you are stuck, the answer cannot be one of these, because you will have tried these right away...The next scheme, the new discovery, is going to be made in a completely different way.

Nintendo's way is to challenge conventional thinking. Not just for the sake of doing things differently, but to do things better.

Creative thinking is not a talent, it is a skill that can be learned. It empowers people by adding strength to their natural abilities which improves teamwork, productivity and, where appropriate, profits.

Breaking the rules and challenging convention is in the DNA of every successful entrepreneur. Doing things differently and solving problems with new, innovative and fresh approaches are the very reason many start-ups are able to compete and sometimes outpace the established market leaders.

In music, which was my world before, you've got thousands and thousands of years of great ideas that have already been thought of. But the internet is basically 20 years old. So you can be way stupider and still have world-changing ideas.

One of the great things about young entrepreneurs is that they don't know that something can't be done. So they try something that's so audacious and usually end up pulling it off.

The idea is this: It's important to upset one's work habits, to topple the cart for each project.

You can make something big when young that will carry you through life. Look at all the big startups like Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. They were all started by very young people who stumbled on something of unseen value. You'll know it when you hit a home run.

Individuals who break through by inventing a new paradigm are almost always...either very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change....These are the men who, being little committed by prior practice to the traditional rules of normal science, are particularly likely to see that those rules no longer define a playable game and to conceive another set that can replace them.

New industries are created by entrepreneurs who don't necessarily have subject matter expertise when they get started, yet they are still responsible for most of the innovation we see in society.

To be successful, you don't have to have all this crazy start-up capital or a ton of knowledge. I think it's actually helpful sometimes to not know all the rules because that way it's easier to break them.

It always helps to have someone who can say, No, we can do it faster this way, or We have to break the rules, even our own rules, to get things done.

I think there is something to be said for what you can do when you don't know what you aren't supposed to be able to do.

We are exploring creative models to pursue innovation outside the confines of our normal process, taking calculated risks and learning from them.

I'm for experimentation. I'm for trying things. That's true whether we're talking about hardware or personnel issues. We need to try some things, because doing what we have always done because we've always done it that way doesn't work.

Build a company that changes the way things get done!

In a startup car company, everything you do has to be done in a different way than a traditional car company. And the main reason is that all of these big car companies are operating like giant well-oiled machines - you could put a very seasoned executive in, and all he has to do is make sure the machine keeps running.

It's very difficult to innovate without requiring people to do something different. And whenever you require people to do something different, you're talking about change.

If you think 20 years out and ask what's the most important company on the planet, it is not any company you could write down today. The most important company 20 years from now has not even been founded yet and doesn't have a name.

I've always been motivated to innovate where the implications are significant.

The most successful people in the world are the ones who thought of that idea that was 'too crazy to work.'