Evan Williams Quotes

At the height of the first great dot-com boom, Craig Kanarick, then in his early 30s, was running Razorfish, a Web design firm he'd co-founded with an old friend, which at its peak had 2,300 employees in nine countries.

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

I think the high-tech industry is used to developing new things very quickly. It's the Silicon Valley way of doing business: You either move very quickly and you work hard to improve your product technology, or you get destroyed by some other company.

I think like a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Failure is a great teacher. At the same time, you must remember, success will never last... Whether it's tech or fashion, it must be for the customer.

It would be idiotic to position ourselves against Silicon Valley.

Benchmark has threatened to block investments that could bolster Uber's competitive position in global markets by bargaining over board seats and its own control.

Remember when those CD-ROMs from AOL came in the mail almost every day? The company was considered ubiquitous, invincible. Former AOL CEO Steve Case was no less a genius than Mark Zuckerberg.

Microsoft has had two goals in the last 10 years. One was to copy the Mac, and the other was to copy Lotus' success in the spreadsheet - basically, the applications business. And over the course of the last 10 years, Microsoft accomplished both of those goals. And now they are completely lost.

In 2000, just before the first dot-com bubble burst, it cost a whopping $5 million to launch a tech startup.

The story of Google is just when everyone concluded that a search engine would never make any money, everyone backed out of it, and Google walked into that vacuum and dominated.

I think the dot-com boom and bust represented the end of the beginning. The industry is more mature today.

If you're a wounded company, the other companies that have been around for a hundred years will smell it, and they will take advantage of you in a heartbeat. It takes a long time to get back in fighting form.

When you start losing market share, it's really tough to gain it back; you need the product portfolio and presence in many markets.

So many dot-com companies were formulated on air.

Except in very narrow cases, where there's breakthrough science that needs patent production, worrying about competitors is a waste of time. If you can't out iterate someone who is trying to copy you, you're toast anyway.

When we look at investing, we always think about 'how defensible is this, how likely is it that somebody is going to copy this.' E-commerce tends to be something easy to copy because it's execution.

Google is a fierce competitor. I wish I was worth a bazillion dollars; that would be really nice. They're a fierce competitor, and they're very good in search. They're very good with their global map thing.

Google has been amazing at acqui-hiring, buying small companies for the engineers. I think in the competitive market of Silicon Valley, it's really a good way to do it. Big acquisitions often don't work out.

All competitors are fierce competitors; Vodafone is the world's second largest company. We fight it each day. Idea Cellular is big and successful, too. Competition is competition; we are used to it.

There was a point in the late '90s where all the graduating M.B.A.'s wanted to start companies in Silicon Valley, and for the most part they were not actually qualified to do it.

I don't think there is any franchise more powerful than ours around securing the consumer experience and we will not concede that to anyone including Microsoft.

Yahoo is a battleship. If you've ever seen a battleship, they're gigantic, and Yahoo is gigantic in the terms of consumer Internet companies. To turn a battleship takes a long time, but once you turn that battle ship the right way, it's a battleship, and it can really inflict some damage on an enemy or competition.

Sir, I did not create a monopoly. Nor did I cheat anyone. I simply had the foresight to bid low and take a loss the first couple of years, with a long view in mind. The only thing I am guilty of is running a successful company.

The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all, but goes on making his own business better all the time.

To spend time in Silicon Valley in a year of political upheaval is, on one level, soothing. It is pleasant to hear talk of wearables, walled gardens, and disruptive beverages in between updates about mass deportation.