Bill Maris Quotes

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.

I think that if you ask what's made us successful, it's because we've been fortunate enough to identify, in a number of cases, great people early. Then we throw all the resources behind them and are aligned with them.

The market is ridiculously overcrowded with early stage investors. This results in a talent drain, where the best talent gets diffused and work for their own startups.

I think the most important reason for our success is that very early in our quest into globalisation, we invested in people - and we have done that consistently and particularly in the service business.

To me, I would much rather be part of a healthy industry than being the only player in a dead industry.

What I learned at Miramax is that if you see where extraordinary creative talent can be brought into the family, move quickly, because if you don't, someone else will.

Companies are bought for their revenue, customer base, technology, or people. A few great companies offer all of these, but any valuable business offers one.

This battle for global talent is so important.

The person who figures out how to harness the collective genius of his or her organization is going to blow the competition away.

Understand what you are acquiring and protect it at all costs. You are acquiring people and next-generation products. You are making an investment that together you can grow faster, make more profits, and take more market share.

Kansas businesses depend on high-skilled workers to be competitive and to contribute to the local economy.

You don't have to be the biggest, the strongest, or the most talented player to be successful, but you do need to be a step ahead of the competition.

Firms gain comparative advantage from how good their people are. Retaining and attracting talent is a key point of competitive advantage in the global economy. We are seeing that play out, and there are implications for Australia, too. The idea that companies now compete on who can pay their workers the lowest - that's all changing.

Innovation keeps me ahead of my competition. It means that my foes must adapt to me, not the other way around.

Design is a response to a specific problem. You are given a problem to solve, and then you let the problem itself tell you what your solution is.

I am enthusiastic over humanity’s extraordinary and sometimes very timely ingenuity. If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver. But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings as constituting the only means for solving a given problem.

You have to ask yourself the question, do you have the smartest people in the world working for your company? And if you do, you're lucky. But if you don't, put up the incentive. And have someone who is absolutely brilliant who's a 22-year old in India who says what about this way? And who revolutionizes the way you do business.

Every day were saying, 'How can we keep this customer happy?' How can we get ahead in innovation by doing this, because if we don't, somebody else will.

If competitors don't like our two to one advantage, dominating market share with both SP and DS, well, I've got bad news. Because we just made it two and a half to one.

Human capital will go where it is wanted, and it will stay where it is well treated. It cannot be driven; it can only be attracted.

Innovation and creativity are the juiciest parts of running a business.

Our sport is ruled whether it's for good and bad, or whatever, for technical things. There's lots of teams out there that could and should have done better if they'd have had technical things. I suppose in the end that basically revolves around how much money they're gonna get.

Talent is our No.1 operating priority and our most important asset.

The mark of an innovative company is not only that it comes up with new ideas first, but also that it knows how to leapfrog when it finds itself behind.

We may need to solve problems not by removing the cause but by designing the way forward even if the cause remains in place.