Frans van Houten Quotes

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've always strived to keep mixing it up, keep doing different things, and work in all different parts of our business.

Most tech companies do one trick and die. If you can do two or three or four, that's where wealth gets created.

I would never suggest anyone to stay at a company more than six or seven years. We grow as individuals and the world is moving so fast. Typically, I'll always sell a piece of each of my companies along the way.

For us to grow globally, it's not enough to just be an exporter. We have to be a creator.

All the action, in semiconductors at the present time is in the new consumer applications, and that's where we have focused our activities since we started doing our own products in the late '90s.

The most successful businesses have an idea for the future that's very different from the present - and that's not fully valued.

Customer expectations? Nonsense. No customer ever asked for the electric light, the pneumatic tire, the VCR, or the CD. All customer expectations are only what you and your competitor have led him to expect. He knows nothing else.

You can't get married to any one particular plan. That is the biggest lesson I learned at PayPal.

Always do something different. Always different things.

Google did a great job hacking the Web to create search - and then monetizing search with advertising. And Apple did a great job humanizing hardware and software so that formerly daunting computers and applications could become consumer-friendly devices - even a lifestyle brand.

I never had a plan. I have to say, I'm very shocked when people start a company and say, 'In five years I want to launch a perfume, or in 10 years I want to have this.' How can you know?

Apple Computer would not have reached its current peak of success if it had feared to roll the dice and launch products that didn't always hit the mark. In the mid-1990s, the company was considered washed up, Steve Jobs had departed, and a string of lackluster product launches unrelated to the company's core business.

We have secured names and trademarks with either loose ideas or intentions, or with our imaginations. Sometimes things come of it, or they don't.

With Virgin, I've just loved creating things. And as a private company, I can get away with moving Virgin from records to airlines to train companies to space companies to whatever, without ever having to worry about analysts knocking the value of my stock.

In the tech world, you can reel off great products in several ways. You can have the once-in-a-lifetime gut instincts of a Steve Jobs. You can have the brainiac coding skills of a Bill Gates, Larry Page, or Sergey Brin. Or, I learned, you can have the deep intellectual curiosity and stubbornness of a Jeff Bezos.

I said from the very beginning, 'Yahoo should position itself as a technology innovation company, not as a media company.'

I think the Indian AI ecosystem is growing rapidly. A lot of Indian entrepreneurs reach out to me seeking feedback about startups and products. And some of them have very interesting business ideas.

I try to make my box as big as it can be because I never want to do the same thing twice.

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

I view edge providers as a significant bright spot in our struggling economy. They are tirelessly innovating, growing, and meeting - often exceeding - consumer expectations.

I think we operate in a very dynamic marketplace, and as such, we need to constantly innovate.

Design has always been at the heart of our business.

Since its inception, HCL's core focus area has been technology and product development, and hence, we continued to remain in the high end of technology throughout the '90s.

I've always been obsessed with marketing and media. I always wanted to be a business brand owner. I wanted to create things.