Marc Randolph Quotes

It’s very hard for any administration, and I’ve worked with seven, to focus on any more than one major thing at a time.

Fundraising is a long and distracting process, and by the end of it, all you want to do is go back to building the product that you're working on.

Growth comes out of a healthy competitive atmosphere, not trying to choose a particular path forward.

Launching a start-up, you need to get a lot done quickly. Every day is different. Everyone pitches in with everything. It's easy for the founding team to say, 'We're flexible. We all help out with everything!' But when it comes to making decisions - that flexibility can spell inefficiency and disaster.

I am not the kind of designer who is racing to the finish line, so while collaborations are important for our growth, each and every one has to be strategic and well-timed with what we have going on internally.

And ours is a business that requires discipline and focus.

We need to make sure that the things we are already working on turn out to do the things we believe they can do and creating value both for the world and ultimately for Google.

The flakier your mission, the fiercer you have to be on the business side.

I have to admit, in January and February I was in an absolute fuzz. I had no one on board. It wasn't that I didn't know what I was doing, but we didn't have all the pieces put together.

Let's form proactive synergy restructuring teams.

Building a company isn't that different from climbing a big mountain. You need people helping you traverse treacherous paths and to lift you up when you fall.

Leadership means forming a team and working toward common objectives that are tied to time, metrics, and resources.

The biggest challenge is to build the team and start the company, while hiring people, raising money, building a brand which has no history, all at the same time. You're doing a lot of things that in an established company are already done.

My greatest love in life is to develop projects. I just get a huge kick out of that. I've been doing it since ever I could.

A manager is a guide. He takes a group of people and says, 'With you I can make us a success; I can show you the way.'

Mobilize people and resources to get results, Not small results but big results. Spend 80% of your time doing development work. Only 20% your time doing administrative work. Never be bureaucrats. Always be leaders.

Amid a multitude of projects, no plan is devised.

I suppose I was always attracted to the producing function - trying to put things together and make things happen.

We're all outriders out there, and what we have is all these large number of tasks - that's the herd; that's all the cattle - a whole bunch of individual, hundreds if not thousands of projects at any given time ongoing that we're trying to complete. So we're trying to keep the cattle herd, keep it all just going in the right direction.

Coaching is very complex: it's like a puzzle, and many things need to come together to make it work.

I loved multi-tasking. I loved being involved in a lot of things. To me, the more complex the better, and so being a leader of a business to me was like, 'Wow, that's what I want to be.'

I always feel that the best kind of producing - and frankly, it has to do with what I like to do - is you're the big-picture person.

A fundamental principle that I learned in my career, and a principle that my consulting company McChrystal Group helps American civilian companies to adopt, is that winning units and organizations ensure that the time they actually spend - daily, weekly, and yearly - must hew closely to their priorities.

Management is defense. You basically say, 'This is the direction; this is where we're heading,' and then it's my job to get everything else out of the way. All the other things that can become a distraction keep us from executing well. Get those out of the way, because the team ultimately needs to run in that direction and execute well.

You have to have an idea of what you need to do, what needs to be fixed, what can be improved, what we should now imagine together which we didn't previously imagine. And having thought of it, decide to go it. And that's the government's role.