Biz Stone Quotes

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.

One of the top causes of startup death - right after cofounder problems - is building something no one wants.

If the company depends entirely on you - your creativity, ingenuity, inspiration, salesmanship or charisma - nobody will want to buy it. The risk and the dependency are too great.

If you have a startup that's keeping it up at night because you think it's so great, then you should do that.

As an entrepreneur, you can have an instinct, and your instinct is right, but your idea you're substantiating that into is wrong, and the world is not ready for it.

Spend the first six to 12 months building a great product or service that people love, rather than chasing investors. When the time comes to engage investors, you will be meeting them from a position of strength. This makes all the difference.

It is incredibly powerful if you solve the problem you actually have yourself. It's really tough to develop a good product when you don't have very close proximity to the people who actually use your product. The closest proximity you can have to those people is to be that person.

Look, I know you meant well creating the world and all, but how could you let it get away from you like this? How come you couldn't stick with your original idea of paradise? People's lives were a mess.

Entrepreneurs need to start building today. The barrier to entry in tech is low, so start designing, start coding it, launch it, build prototypes, build a working version of it. The Internet has amazing powers of distribution. You can test your ideas. You can see if it works, if it doesn't work, whether it's fun, and whether you're sufficiently motivated. People who go into entrepreneurship to get rich aren't going to be happy. It’s the building of things that makes you happy. You have to enjoy the process whether you succeed or fail.

You need to spend all of your time and energy on creating something that actually brings value to the people you're asking for money!

Entrepreneurship is the engine fuelling innovation, employment generation and economic growth. Only by creating an environment where entrepreneur- ship can prosper and where entrepreneurs can try new ideas and empower others can we ensure that many of the world’s issues will not go unaddressed.

I try to help founders as much as I can, but so many of us we won't even take meetings with people who still just have an idea, because everyone has an idea.

There's no such thing as good ideas and bad ideas. There are only your own ideas and other people's. If you want someone to like your idea, tell him he said it first last week and you just remembered it.

Creating is really what I like to do. The best thing in the world is to have an idea in the back of your head and then to make that idea into a movie and have people all over the world enjoy it.

You have to figure out what conversion means in your case. What does retention mean? What does activation mean? For every business, it's going to be slightly different because of the nature of the product and the kinds of people who use it.

Don't let people tell you your ideas won't work.

I think the greatest tragedy of mankind is that people have ideas and opinions in their heads but don't have a process for properly examining these ideas to find out what's true. That creates a world of distortions.

I was always fascinated with the way that things pop on the Internet - the ways you build communities and create little stories and ideas that people play around with and send back to you.

Good products are built by people who want to use it themselves

Safety is a basic human need. People with a sense of security and belonging are stabilized for learning, creating, innovating. A group of wonderfully cared for, confident individuals will generate great ideas.

The question is, once you have this idea, is this enough? Is it something people would actually switch just to have?

Human-centered design. Meeting people where they are and really taking their needs and feedback into account. When you let people participate in the design process, you find that they often have ingenious ideas about what would really help them. And it’s not a onetime thing; it’s an iterative process.

When you have to prove the value of your ideas by persuading other people to pay for them, it clears out an awful lot of woolly thinking.

It's the disease of thinking that a having a great idea is really 90% of the work. And if you just tell people, 'here's this great idea,' then of course they can go off and make it happen. The problem with that is that there's a tremendous amount of craftsmanship between a having a great idea and having a great product.

Having the ability to be brutally honest with yourself is the greatest challenge you face when creating a business model. Too often we oversell ourselves on the quality of the idea, service, or product. We don't provide an honest assessment of how we fit in the market, why customers will buy from us, and at what price.