Craig McCaw Quotes

The businessman says 'If I don't do it first, somebody else will.' The artist says 'If I don't do it first, nobody else will.'

A company doesn't have to compete with Amazon. A company can instead innovate in sectors Amazon doesn't presently care about.

Don't bother starting the 10,000th restaurant in Manhattan. Find something to do that if you don't do it, it won't get done.

Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.

I won't speak for the entertainment industry. I speak for Disney. I've seen people in the industry come to work every morning paranoid about what the other person or other company is doing. That means you're spending time and focus on somebody else's business instead of your own.

The opportunity ahead for Microsoft is vast, but to seize it, we must focus clearly, move faster, and continue to transform.

When I came out of Stanford, I looked at my brilliant classmates, who were going into Wall Street high finance, Silicon Valley, advanced engineering, and I said to myself, 'Jeff, go into an industry where nobody can add.'

I love high-performance technologies, the stuff that's the brains of today's products, and AMD was one of the few companies that had this type of technology. I always believed that it was a company that had great technical capability but needed better business focus.

Elon Musk should be at the top of the list of people to emulate when it comes to leading large organizations that are highly maneuverable and use it as a competitive advantage.

We can only compete in the world against competitors from Asia, the United States, or wherever if we look at unmet needs.

The time to go into a new business is when it’s badly run by others.

With a wonderful business, you can figure out what will happen; you can't figure out when it will happen. You don't want to focus on when, you want to focus on what. If you're right about what, you don't have to worry about when

Focus on your business strengths and keep its weaknesses away from the competition or public.

Swim upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom. If everybody else is doing it one way, there's a good chance you can find your niche by going in exactly the opposite direction. But be prepared for a lot of folks to wave you down and tell you you're headed the wrong way. I guess in all my years, what I heard more often than anything was: a town of less than 50,000 population cannot support a discount store for very long.

OLD: Be No.1 or No.2 in Your Market. NEW: Find a Niche, Create Something New.

Competition is overrated. In practice it is quite destructive and should be avoided wherever possible. Much better than fighting for scraps in existing markets is to create and own new ones.

The cure for Apple is not cost-cutting. The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament.

The only barrier to entry you can create is to consistently build a great product.

You should be innovating so fast that you're invalidating your prior patents.

Capitalism is the only society in human history in which neither tradition nor conscious direction supervises the total effort of the community; it is the only society in which the future, the needs for tomorrow, are entirely left to an automatic system.

Once open source gets good enough, competing with it would be insane.

Focus too much on the near-term and you won't get tomorrow's customers, focus too much on the long-term and you won't get today's.

I can turn an idea into a business before you know it's going to be important. My first step will blow by you.

Because these firms listened to their customers, invested aggressively in new technologies that would provide their customers more and better products of the sort they wanted, and because they carefully studied market trends and systematically allocated investment capital to innovations that promised the best returns, they lost their positions of leadership.

An important re-engineering principle is that companies should focus on their core competence and outsource everything else.