Rob Pike Quotes

Every problem is super-interesting and has its own nuances, and you solve it today, but you try to solve it with an architecture. You build a machine to solve the problems that are like it later. And then you move on to the next.

Writing software is a very intense, very personal thing. You have to have time to work your way through it, to understand it. Then debug it.

I love working out how things are made, which is why I have so many models of towers.

The rules of navigation never navigated a ship. The rules of architecture never built a house.

The aim of open government is to take advantage of the know-how and entrepreneurial spirit of those outside government institutions to work together with those inside government to solve problems.

As an architect, you cannot be so arrogant as to say you are 100% sure about what you do.

Each new situation requires a new architecture.

That's what we're focusing on at Not Impossible Labs, looking at problems or needs that can be solved through hacking, modding, programming, whatever, so it helps one person first but has the potential to help many others.

When you start a company, it's more an art than a science because it's totally unknown. Instead of solving high-profile problems, try to solve something that's deeply personal to you. Ideally, if you're an ordinary person and you've just solved your problem, you might have solved the problem for millions of people.

Nothing is as dangerous in architecture as dealing with separated problems. If we split life into separated problems we split the possibilities to make good building art.

My architecture is the architecture of survival.

Building is just skilled labor, I suppose. It's a lot of work. I don't mind other people building them, but the way things go together and are made is interesting to me; I like that a lot.

It's really easy to create a $1 billion company - you just have to solve a $10 billion problem.

Building a house is like producing a movie. There's no right way to do it but a lot of wrong ways. You have to be flexible and creative. You have to move fast, be prepared - or it quickly becomes costly.

I loved logic, math, computer programming. I loved systems and logic approaches. And so I just figured architecture is this perfect combination.

The organizational architecture is really that a centipede walks on hundred legs and one or two don't count. So if I lose one or two legs, the process will go on, the organization will go on, the growth will go on.

Be careful not to start a company that really belongs as a feature of another company, like the 25 Twitter URL shortener companies out there. Pick a real problem that's here to stay.

The overall experience Skype provided was superior to other folks because of the underlying architecture and the ability to provide a superior experience.

In business, you have to be strong. If you are weak, people are going to take advantage.

Solving problems for users at scale ultimately results in monetization opportunities.

The best customers for us are the ones that present us with a new problem because chances are, if one customer has that problem, 100 more have it, or 1,000, or 10,000. So you start thinking about solution development rather than product development.

All the biggest companies are based on a founder who had a need, hacked it together, and said, 'Hey, other people might want this.'

You must understand the difference between being an architect and a politician. Architecture is a profession of perseverance. You have to come through. The politician is there to blame someone.

I'm a firm believer of the venture capitalist-style approach to solving problems. Rather than doing many small things that you hope add up, it's much more effective to work on projects that are high risk and high reward.

It's a lot easier to figure out how to scale something that doesn't feel like it would scale than it is to figure out what is actually gonna work. You're much better off going after something that will work that doesn't scale, then trying to figure how to scale it up, than you are trying to figure it all out.