Steve Brown Quotes

Innovation requires an experimental mindset.

We love experimentation. That's where the gold nuggets come from.

I miss that thing I used to do when I first started out where I would just spontaneously generate ideas and try things and see where they'd go.

It's fun to be creative and innovative and come up with something crazy. So I need people to work with who are not going to be afraid to take it to the left a bit.

You can't buy something which does not exist. In a way, let's make things exist and then judge later. Don't cancel the process of creativity too early; let it flow.

In order to innovate, you have to experiment.

The employees who share innovative ideas may also be the folks who have some hidden talents that would help incorporate their suggestions.

Innovation is all about people. Innovation thrives when the population is diverse, accepting and willing to cooperate.

I'm one of those actors who is going to come in with 2,500 ideas. You can shoot down 2,499, but one of them you're going to like.

BuzzFeed started as a lab with a small team where we would play with ideas.

I guess some people are brilliant enough to be brilliant on their own and never doubt anything and come up with fabulous things. But I think it's good to get into arguments with people and have them say, 'That sucks' or 'You're crazy' or 'That's cheesy' or 'What do you think of this?'

I think we always move from imitation to assimilation to innovation, but I can't name you 20 people outside those we've already recognized who ever got to point three: innovation.

I keep a creative group around me.

Ideas come mostly bottoms-up. They come when you have a free flow of ideas and you have people able to combine multiple ideas into one concept... And you've got to have competition, too. You've got to say, 'We're going to have 10 different ideas, nine of them are going to fail, and the one that does the best is going to move forward.'

I like to experiment a lot and invent things.

Worst ideas? Me? Whatever do you mean? There are no bad ideas.

What I learned with tech companies is I gotta give people room to experiment, and also to make what might later on be a mistake. This is the attitude I want to build within San Francisco - give some time to the tech community.

For good ideas and true innovation, you need human interaction, conflict, argument, debate.

Part of the beauty of Silicon Valley is that people generally encourage you to think crazy. It's the hypothesis that there's nothing sacred that can't be changed.

You have to think that the answer - and the right answer - for you and your organization might not be something that's been done before. And it's up to you to discover and work with your team to form and figure out how to do successfully.

There is no science in creativity. If you don't give yourself room to fail, you won't innovate.

I personally believe that a critical part to innovation is that exchange of ideas so when you say, 'Here's my idea,' someone else at the next table, who is in a different party, will go, 'Oh, these guys are trying that,' so that comes.

My absolutely favorite time of working on a project is the time I spend not knowing what it is. Because the longer you live inside that period, the likelier you are to discover something new.

In addition to encouraging failure, I would also encourage companies to broadly create a culture of innovation. That should mean more than just technology and invention; it should mean something millennials know well: Ingenuity.

If you have a culture of respect, creativity flows. You create this energy, and then people have more desire to take risks.