Dan Schulman Quotes

Why is it that big companies fail when the technology changes? It happens in every industry, so what's the pattern? What are they all doing wrong?

They're protecting an archaic industry. They should turn their attention to new models.

Uber is redefining the transportation industry now; Airbnb is doing it to the hotel industry. You can expect that to happen in every single industry.

Every single industry is going through a major business model and technology oriented disruption.

And you know, I've had great fun turning quite a lot of different industries on their head and making sure those industries will never be the same again, because Virgin went in and took them on.

I spend a little bit of time exploring why the companies that were doing smartphone ride-hailing before Uber, why they failed.

Whether by design or circumstance, every startup will eventually get disrupted.

Even my agents say, We don't know what this business is anymore.

We, we - as I say, we go in and shake up other industries and I think, you know, we do it differently and I think that industries are not quite the same as a result of Virgin attacking the market.

It's not about revenues: The fundamental economics in digital business is scale and margins. The top line has become the bottom line.

We did some soul-searching. Was the cable industry obsolete? Was it an opportune time to get out? Our conclusion was that if you rebuilt your system with this new fiber-optic coaxial hybrid - which we now call broadband - the glass was half full, not half empty. We could compete.

History is replete with examples of tech firms that were marginalized by new companies and technologies.

Whether it's steamships disrupted by the railroads or railroads disrupted by the airlines, it's typically the large entrenched incumbents that are displaced by innovators.

There's a smugness that goes with being a huge company. The big fish say, 'If it's so great, why didn't we invent it?' But how'd you like to be makin' buggy whips when cars came along?

News organisations that have been around a while have a lot of traditions and ways of doing things that may have served them for many years but perhaps make them less flexible in the digital era. As an entrepreneur, it just makes more sense to start something new.

Innovation and disruption are the hallmarks of the technology world, and hardly a moment passes when we are not thinking, doing, or talking about these topics.

This is the age of disruption.

Traditional businesses can say, 'We're going to sell widgets to people, and it will make X amount of profit.' But new business models are hard.

The music industry really has to learn a lesson from the tech industry about what scale means at the end of the day and learning how to monetize.

You can't replicate Seamless or OpenTable for another industry.

Our legacy platforms have served us well for decades, but we're running out of upgrades that will keep us ahead. Technology is changing too fast, and our enemies are too adaptable.

The power of change that mobile technology unleashes is extraordinary.

Uber was probably the perfect inflection point of a world that is changing so fast in terms of consumers that are... pushing that button and using the mobile phone as the remote control for their life.

Every time you see a new paradigm emerge, it's always new vendors that lead it. I can't think of one case where an incumbent led a paradigm shift.

When you look around Silicon Valley at new companies, there are very few ideas that are going to make a dent in the universe.