Brad Stone Quotes

After a while of getting jerked around, you realize what the business is really made up of.

You can be in this business 50 years and still not know anything about it.

It's so easy to make things complicated in business.

Admiration takes on a whole new level when you appreciate just how complex it is to run a modern business.

Size—sheer, unmanageable size—is the root problem [of the State Department] in Washington and overseas today.

If you have managers reporting to managers in a startup, you will fail. Once you get beyond startup, if you have managers reporting to managers, you will create politics.

There is a point of complexity beyond which a business is no longer manageable.

Yeah, leading an examined life, I always say, is a pain in the ass. It adds an element of complexity to business that most businessmen don't want to hear about. They just want to call a fabric manufacturer, and say, "Hey, give us 10,000 yards of shirting."

Life is too complicated not to be orderly.

Best startups generally come from somebody needing to scratch an itch.

What's both fascinating and challenging about investing is that the changing nature of business and finance means you can never have it all figured out.

A business model that hasn't been tried before is always interesting, even if it's likely to fail.

All humans are entrepreneurs not because they should start companies but because the will to create is encoded in human DNA.

The healthier a new venture and the faster it grows, the more financial feeding it requires.

No one is born a CEO, but no one tells you that. The magazine stories make it sound like Mark Zuckerberg woke up one day and wanted to redefine how the world communicates [by creating] a billion-dollar company. He didn't.

The more successful the unit, the more difficult it is to make sure that the large company doesn't put the same expectations on it as it does for the rest of the company. When it's a new venture, whether it's outside or inside the business, it's a child. And you don't put a 40-pound pack on a 6-year-old's back when you take her hiking.

Don't even trust that you are able to unify what everyone is thinking; it is impossible

Growth isn't central at all, because I'm trying to run this company as if it's going to be here a hundred years from now. And if you take where we are today and add 15% growth, like public companies need to have for their stock to stay up in value, I'd be a multi-trillion-dollar company in 40 years. Which is impossible, of course.

The length of this document defends it well against the risk of its being read.

Startups are the engines of exponential growth, manifesting the power of innovation. Several big companies today are startups of yesterday. They were born with a spirit of enterprise and adventure kept alive due to hardwork and perseverance and today have become shining beacons of innovation.

Most of the problems of government come from people being overwhelmed by the size and scale of what they have to do.

A great opportunity is often hard to be explained clearly; things that can be explained clearly are often not the best opportunities.

Business is many things, the least of which is the balance sheet. It is a fluid, ever changing, living thing, sometimes building to great peaks, sometimes falling to crumbled lumps.

The barrier to change is not too little caring; it is too much complexity.