Adam D'Angelo Quotes

We need to be focused in corporate America on the long term.

We've tried to build Sequoia Capital with an eye for the long term that we really look for in the companies we like to partner with.

From the beginning... I wanted to build a company that could sustain not for two years or four years or even ten years but be something that really matters over time the way Amazon and Google and others have.

My goal is to get another 30 years out of this business. So I need to figure out the fuel to do that. And so far, I think it's respect and quality and company, not celebrity or box office or stardom. It's not a sprinter's approach. It's more like a long-distance thing. You can stick around a lot longer if you kind of slow-play it.

Any jerk can have short-term earnings. You squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, and the company sinks five years later.

We must shift our thinking away from short-term gain toward long-term investment and sustainability, and always have the next generations in mind with every decision we make.

As far as Ola is concerned, we are focused and determined to build a business that can sustain and be impactful.

It is important that global business leaders understand that they need to think beyond their quarterly balance sheets and see what it is that they are creating.

Management is all about managing in the short term, while developing the plans for the long term.

In order to have your short term policies accepted, you have to have your long term policies understood.

We're so used to thinking in the short term, and the minute you speak in more long-term language then you tend to get dismissed as utopian and so on. We have a real problem here in making long-term thinking respectable

Two types of choices seem to me to have been crucial in tipping their outcomes towards success or failure: long-term planning, and willingness to reconsider core values.

We need investors who plant and grow, not reap and run.

I truly believe that the combination of a strong top line together with a strong bottom line is what makes for a sustainable business.

Some entrepreneurs talk of a high burn rate, high advertising rate, and so on, with no outcome, so it doesn't impress me. But an entrepreneur who has that kind of a feeling of responsibility towards his investors is somebody who will have all my support.

I'm the ninth CEO of IBM. Every one of my predecessors has steered through a technological shift, and every one left the company in a better position than the person before them and prepared this company with a very strong balance sheet to allow it to continue to invest for the next shift.

We're very much focused on full shareholder-value return. We have to get our stock moving. But I won't do something in the short run that I don't feel is right for the long run. That, I've watched many CEOs do.

You have to build businesses for longer term.

Whatever you do needs to be sustainable over time, and taking the money in the short term and taking it in a bubble - like buying an Internet stock in 2000 - may not be sustainable.

I'm not interested in world domination. I'm interested in running a nice little brand that takes care of its own and does really good work.

Always build. If you start at fever pitch, there's nowhere to go.

My job is to make sure that 10 and 15 years from now, people aren't going to say, 'Oh, do you remember Merck?'

You're kind of taught that the role of a business person is the decision making.

It's easy to be a short-term hero. It is very easy for me to get tremendous results very short term, get that translated into compensation, and be off sailing in the Bahamas. But the goal for this company - and it's very difficult to do - the goal is to follow a four- or five-year process.

Because entrepreneurship is so hard and does take so long to build something great, you do have to build an environment that you yourself as an entrepreneur want to work in for the next 20 years.