Jimmy Johnson Quotes

When the venture industry started, it was enough to just have money and then it was enough to sort of have this big fuzzy brand. But now startups are getting a lot smarter.

I believe that at some point we should come up with a business model that would make us sustainable.

By doing what they must do to keep their margins strong and their stock price healthy, every company paves the way for its own disruption.

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.

I think Microsoft will have to change. I think that the business of Microsoft, the company of Microsoft, is going to continue to succeed. But I think the business model of Microsoft is going to have to change.

If you're a wounded company, the other companies that have been around for a hundred years will smell it, and they will take advantage of you in a heartbeat. It takes a long time to get back in fighting form.

We, we - as I say, we go in and shake up other industries and I think, you know, we do it differently and I think that industries are not quite the same as a result of Virgin attacking the market.

If a product's future is unlikely to be remarkable - if you can't imagine a future in which people are once again fascinated by your product - it's time to realize that the game has changed. Instead of investing in a dying product, take profits and reinvest them in building something new.

Focusing on the long term and building a great product that is scalable ultimately leads to a great company.

A lot of web companies will take a short-term approach and sell to an incumbent and don't end up living up to their full potential.

Innovation must lead infrastructure for a simple but compelling reason: Innovation produces new types of products and markets, and it is virtually impossible to know how to run those markets efficiently before they are created.

The mistake that makes launching a venture expensive is when you try to make a disruptive technology so good that it can compete on a quality basis with an established product.

The only thing that scares me in the tech area is that it moves so fast that you have to be ready to invest in 20 things. Because if you just invest in one, next week, somebody has a better mousetrap, and you get taken to the cleaners.

My own view is that every company requires a long-term view.

Most companies that are great at something - like AOL dialup or Borders bookstores - do not become great at new things people want (streaming for us) because they are afraid to hurt their initial business.

The reason why it is so difficult for existing firms to capitalize on disruptive innovations is that their processes and their business model that make them good at the existing business actually make them bad at competing for the disruption.

And you know, I've had great fun turning quite a lot of different industries on their head and making sure those industries will never be the same again, because Virgin went in and took them on.

If companies don't think systemically enough - if they try to capture too much of the value - eventually, innovation moves somewhere else.

They're protecting an archaic industry. They should turn their attention to new models.

Situations emerge in the process of creative destruction in which many firms may have to perish that nevertheless would be able to live on vigorously and usefully if they could weather a particular storm.

Enterprises that depend on many rarely succeed.

The window was open for us to play in the consumer as data, voice, video came together. This is where you have to have the courage to take good business risks because if you don't, you never win.

You have to build businesses for longer term.

Whenever you start a new business, the sheer number of variables at hand makes failure a constant possibility.

Sometimes, the startup game works in your favor just because you got in at the right time and right environment. Other times, you're a little too late entering an already crowded space. But startups with strong fundamentals withstand external conditions and come out ahead in good or bad times.