John Katzman Quotes

I love building companies; I love making products.

It took us three years to build the NeXT computer. If we'd given customers what they said they wanted, we'd have built a computer they'd have been happy with a year after we spoke to them - not something they'd want now.

In a startup, in the early days, it can be hard to explain what you do.

There are two ways to extend a business. Take inventory of what you're good at and extend out from your skills. Or determine what your customers need and work backward, even if it requires learning new skills. Kindle is an example of working backward.

I take a lean-startup approach: creating agile, interdisciplinary teams that get the minimum viable product to market as soon as possible. It's my job to be entrepreneur-in-residence, an internal change agent.

Some people are serial entrepreneurs and want to just move on to the next thing. They just want to clean the slate and start from scratch. I feel that sometimes, too, and the way that we do that here is we build things inside Shutterstock: we launch new products all the time.

Every entrepreneur needs ideas, vision, and creativity - no matter what the product or service. Not only that, but the product should truly delight customers and become an essential part of their lives.

You pick what your customers want, not what your entrenched business model may require you to do.

It typically takes multiple iterations and pivots to find product/market fit - the match between what you're building and who will buy it.

Being right is important. Too many great teams march off saying, 'If we build it, they will come,' and then never are able to change the idea towards something that people really want.

In their infancy, startups need geniuses who fit their current tight-knit culture and will iterate quickly as they push towards an ambitious vision - and they need a scaffolding of advisors, strategists, early users, and product-thinkers around these savants to guide them.

As an entrepreneur, I've learned how crucial it is to be able to call a spade a spade and avoid falling in love with a particular strategy or product. Instead, you need to let the customer tell you what she needs - and to change her as she changes.

A. T. Stewart started life with a dollar and fifty cents. This merchant prince began by calling at the doors of houses in order to sell needles, thread and buttons. He soon found the people did not want them, and his small stock was thrown back on his hands. Then he said wisely, "I'll not buy any more of these goods, but I'll go and ask people what they do want." Thereafter he studied the needs and desires of people, found out just what they most wanted, endeavored to meet those wants, and became the greatest business man of his time.

That's what we do when we work in Silicon Valley tech startups: We think about who's going to benefit from this. That's almost the only thing we think about.

There are a lot of people building small ideas now. There's an idealization of being an entrepreneur, but the most important thing is to have a really great idea.

I get a lot of criticism for telling founders to focus first on making something great, instead of worrying about how to make money. And yet that is exactly what Google did. And Apple, for that matter. You'd think examples like that would be enough to convince people.

Software innovation, like almost every other kind of innovation, requires the ability to collaborate and share ideas with other people, and to sit down and talk with customers and get their feedback and understand their needs.

The goal wasn't to create a billion-dollar company. The goal was to create something useful where I could learn things.

What interests me is starting businesses on our own, finding ideas that we can support, and simply investing in invention.

I think, with any new product that's difficult to understand, there are always lots of questions and criticism. I think we have all the right criticism. We're just going to keep executing on what we believe.

I focus on consumer Internet. Sometimes it's a working prototype; sometimes it's an idea on a napkin. I don't do a ton of deals a year, and I really like working with startups - it's the only way I can invest. It fits my ADD brain.

The way to build billion dollar companies is to first build something people love. There isn't really a shortcut there.

My sweet spot is figuring out how to make a product that people love and how to refine it to make them love it more. All the rest is business noise.

My friends are people who like building cool stuff. We always have this joke about people who want to just start companies without making something valuable. There's a lot of that in Silicon Valley.

You need to invent things and you need to get them to people. You need to commercialize those inventions. Obviously, the best way we've come up with doing that is through companies.