Edwin Catmull Quotes

The most essential thing for us was to get the business model right, then put the world-class technology under it to support it. At Merrill, that meant not doing what people expected.

You know, IBM was almost knocked out of the box by other types of computer software and manufacturing.

In the technology world, you have to execute fast or you're out of business.

Today, the forces of competition, technology, and globalization have converged to spur innovation and to transform the way business is done in the securities industry.

Global competition is about winners and losers.

Competition matters.

Competition can never be eliminated from this industry. There is nothing wrong with it. It keeps you on your toes, making you work harder.

In this business, technology is life or death.

Every kid coming out of Harvard, every kid coming out of school now thinks he can be the next Mark Zuckerberg, and with these new technologies like cloud computing, he actually has a shot.

I want to create something like Sony. Not in terms of manufacturing products but creating something that is innovative, makes money, improves peoples' lives.

Is there anyone out there who is the next Steve Jobs? I think Jeff Bezos is pretty close. He is very smart. He is extremely creative. He has completely reinvented the way in which commerce is done online.

It's very difficult in the technology space when you have been leapfrogged to prosper again.

Except in very narrow cases, where there's breakthrough science that needs patent production, worrying about competitors is a waste of time. If you can't out iterate someone who is trying to copy you, you're toast anyway.

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

Even when early innovations start to succeed, it is not uncommon to see growing businesses sabotaged for threatening the status quo.

I've always liked the fact that anyone with a great idea, access to the Internet, and an unrelenting will can spark a world-beating company simply by standing up code on the Internet and/or leveraging the information and relationship network that is the web. That's how Facebook started, after all.

The venture industry is both quite vibrant and quite competitive.

You have to be willing to risk things; otherwise, somebody else will put you out of business.

I think the high-tech industry is used to developing new things very quickly. It's the Silicon Valley way of doing business: You either move very quickly and you work hard to improve your product technology, or you get destroyed by some other company.

When I came into the mobile phone business, I was really the upstart who pretty much took the business, not quite by storm, but really made an impact on it quite early on. But it was from a position, really, of feeling that I was a last mover.

Investors can see that Facebook is feeling old and tired and isn't seeming to be that innovative.

But my sense in talking to people when I travel is that the film business is not that dissimilar from a lot of other businesses.

Patents have not been a positive force in stimulating innovation at Cisco. Competition has been the motivator; bringing new products to market in a timely manner is critical. Everything we have done to create new products would have been done even if we could not obtain patents

We live in a dynamic time, where the rate of change and the rate of innovation are very high. It’s not equal in all segments or sectors of the economy, but we are seeing a lot of innovation in certain sectors, and I expect that to continue.

Consulting offered me an opportunity to see a lot of different businesses in different regions of the world, to see how textiles were being affected by foreign competition, how technology was changing.