Gordon Bethune Quotes

Well, we know that people in Australia love the idea of both Impulse and Virgin Blue getting up and adding a bit of competition, and it's fun to be able to deliver it.

The need for air transport is real, and it's not going to change. The key is to have the right business model and have the right initiatives, in my view, to succeed.

People in retail banks are not smart. They have a business model that's quite difficult to not make money out of - but still they somehow manage it.

Airlines go in the long run at the competition to reason. For the passenger the competition is good, because each competitor tries to undercut the other one.

The airline business is the biggest team sport in the world. When you're all consumed with fighting among yourselves, your opponents can run over you every day.

The Airbus consortium will not be daunted by the Americans who killed off the Concorde …. We will fight any trade war blow-by-blow as the future of the aeronautical industry and their employees are at stake.

When the price of a drug rises, it becomes profitable and the target of new competition.

Look at the computer industry. I've watched a lot of companies come and go, some that were right at the pinnacle of their success.

The worst sort of business is one that grows rapidly, requires significant capital to engender the growth, and then earns little or no money. Think airlines. Here a durable competitive advantage has proven elusive ever since the days of the Wright Brothers. Indeed, if a farsighted capitalist had been present at Kitty Hawk, he would have done his successors a huge favor by shooting Orville down.

One of the questions I've always hated answering is how do people make money in open source. And I think that Caldera and Red Hat - and there are a number of other Linux companies going public - basically show that yes, you can actually make money in the open-source area.

I think Google is the most successful attention merchant - profitable attention merchant in the history of the world, most successful advertising-only based company - most profitable. They started a very idealistic, beautiful company in many ways, but they didn't have a business model.

You'll find many markets where bottlers of Pepsi and Coke both make a lot of money and many others where they destroy most of the profitability of the two franchises. That must get down to the peculiarities of individual adjustment to market capitalism. I think you 'd have to know the people involved to fully understand what was happening.

I have so many runner-up cups that I am thinking of starting my own tea shop.

It might be harder for us to charge a higher interest rate, like they do, so it might not be as profitable for us. But we can either compete or partner, like we've announced with On Deck, which does some of the stuff we just spoke about.

Try stuff. I also used to believe that it's better to be smart than lucky because if you're smart you can out-think the competition. I don't believe that anymore-this is not to say that you should strive for a high level of stupidity. My point is that luck is a big part of many successes, so (a) don't get too bummed out when you see a bozo succeed; and (b) luck favors the people who try stuff, not simply think and analyze. As the Chinese say, "One must wait for a long time with your mouth open before a Peking duck flies in your mouth."

I jumped horses over big dangerous fences in competition. And got very, very good at it, at quite a high level. And I realized long since that, yeah, it's the same thing that appeals to me about it. You can't think about anything else, in either case; jumping horses in competition, show jumping, or flying an airplane, for whatever purpose.

The worst sort of business is one that grows rapidly, requires significant capital to engender the growth, and then earns little or no money. Think airlines. Here a durable competitive advantage has proven elusive ever since the days of the Wright Brothers. Indeed, if a farsighted capitalist had been present at Kitty Hawk, he would have done his successors a huge favor by shooting Orville down.

people think they know what they're getting, and they're always wrong.

I don't think Bruce Willis can compete with me. I have a much better voice.

The world is a big place. There are lots of smart people in it. Entrepreneurs are kidding themselves if they think they have any kind of monopoly on knowledge. And, sure as I'm a Macintosh user, on the same day that an entrepreneur tells this lie, the venture capitalist will have met with another company that's doing the same thing.

I think that the only way that you're going to succeed anywhere is to fail, as crazy as that sounds. It's the only way. You have to fail your way up.

Politics is about who wins and loses. The rest is of marginal interest.

People with a scarcity mentality think there is only so much in the world to go around. It's as if they see life as a pie. When another person gets a big piece, then they get less. Such people are always trying to get even, to pull others down to their level so they can get an equal or even bigger piece of the pie.

While a lot of my day, like most people's, is spent thinking about me, I can see how it's a universal thing: the competition, the clashes of personality that fuel the world and fill the world, are the exact same ones that take place just between two people. I just think politics is a form, en masse, of human relations.

Everyone you trust, everyone you think you can count on, will eventually disappoint you.