Alan Autry Quotes

I'm trying to construct a world that maximises the probability that SpaceX continues its mission without me.

I can't tell you how many board meetings I've been in where the CEO is anguished over the impacts on morale that cost cutting or layoffs will bring about. You know what hurts morale even more than cost-cutting and layoffs? Going out of business.

I've always been a big believer in diversification for anybody. It's never good to put all of your efforts and all of your time and all of your financial resources into just one project. Diversification is key for any individual and any business.

Concentrate your energies, your thoughts and your capital. The wise man puts all his eggs in one basket and watches the basket.

One way to mitigate our risk is to invest in companies with understandable business models.

Business is all about risk taking and managing uncertainties and turbulence.

I like not to feel that all my eggs are in one basket, or I get nervous.

By getting into distribution and production, I am actually widening my base.

The way you continue to be a successful business is you don't wait for the car to go off the cliff. You have to manage yourself. And make sure you do it in the right way so you are not making decisions in crisis.

Take care to sell your horse before he dies. The art of life is passing losses on.

The great decision was the Explorer program. The thing we did not do well is that we allowed and somewhat encouraged too much exposure to the program.

You can't base an industry solely on one person. That's a very vulnerable business strategy.

We're certainly interested in maximizing our return and doing it - we're interested in maximizing our return, but we're also interested in doing it over a long period of time and in doing it in a way that never endangers the firm from a survivability standpoint.

A lot of the bunkering is designed more to save you than it is to penalize you.

The threat from extreme weather events highlights the importance of investing in preparedness.

Innovation requires resources to invest, and you can see many companies pulling back and going into an intense protective mode in a major extended period of financial distress.

I have learned that nothing is certain except for the need to have strong risk management, a lot of cash, the willingness to invest even when the future is unclear, and great people.

One of the great responsibilities that I have is to manage my assets wisely, so that they create value.

So is civil society prepared for the future? Probably not. Most organisations have to live hand to mouth, juggling short-term funding and perpetual minor crises. Even the bigger ones rarely get much time to stand back and look at the bigger picture. Many are on a treadmill chasing after contracts and new funding.

If you run a business, if you are responsible for a lot of people, you come to grips with the reality that you have to have discipline. You have to protect the enterprise in order to take care of the employees. So, therefore, you can't be wasteful. You can't squander things, or you jeopardize other people.

It is one thing to seek out new ways to grow your company and new potential streams of income from new services or products, but it is quite another to take on responsibilities that are far from your primary job as Entrepreneur.

Issues like security threats, declining traffic, high insurance premiums, rising fuel costs, among others, call for individual strengths to be aligned towards regional stability.

It's been great that every title that we've done internally has been a huge success, but when you've got 50 or 100 people on there, all their families and everyone counting on you there, the idea of 'What if you screw up once?' or 'What if the market changes?'

We don't want to go starting completely separate businesses that do nothing for our user base.

As a CEO, you have to take the active action to force most of your resources to stand idle from time to time - or go bankrupt.