Craig Sherman Quotes

The key for us is always a multiple-year strategy, and a multiple-year strategy means great products, great customer relationships, and doing solid engineering.

Great companies are built on great products.

If you have a great idea that can translate elsewhere, then that's where the scalability comes in - and that's where you can actually start to make real money.

You need to focus on creating the actual value of the company, not just the theoretical value. The actual value comes from a great product that sells well and is ultimately profitable.

Companies that grow for the sake of growth or that expand into areas outside their core business strategy often stumble. On the other hand, companies that build scale for the benefit of their customers and shareholders more often succeed over time.

There is a wide range of opportunities for us and we see a main part of our strategy as being a company that supplies products across a range of different end applications and indeed we have quite a wide product portfolio which we enhance each year.

We are really very lucky to have so many fantastic brands. But to grow them we should not be too much in a hurry. They are growing fast, but they have to grow accordingly to the market and to the capacity we have to deliver good products.

You can't just tell your team, 'Think long term.' It doesn't work that way. When you are starting out, you have to always think about trying to build something of value for the customer: something they can use all the time, something of use.

It's easier to build a business around a first-class product, even if it's a more expensive product to produce.

Business has only two functions - marketing and innovation.

A strategy is something like, an innovative new product; globalization, taking your products around the world; be the low-cost producer. A strategy is something you can touch; you can motivate people with; be number one and number two in every business. You can energize people around the message.

Our line of business structure has served us very well in the past, when customer segments and product requirements were very distinct.

To me, a great company starts with a great product and ends with a great product.

I've built my business around the No. 7.

If we're building high quality companies, if the customers like the products, if the technology innovation is real, then the substance is going to win out in the end.

I admit that the direct model has done a lot for Dell. That's the only thing the company has ever really accomplished.

In business, every phase of things counts. Companies that just yell out a low price today to win business aren't going to make money in the long term.

I am wired like a CEO and care a great deal about the bottom line, but I care about my customers even more than that. That's always been my competitive advantage.

Southwest Airlines is successful because the company understands it's a customer service company. It also happens to be an airline.

If I make a good product and deliver value to users and to the world, the financial gains will come.

An exit is only a success if you set an exit as your primary goal. My primary goal was to build a globally influential tool, to build something from the ground up that could literally change how we communicated in business and individually.

You've got to figure out how you're going to come in and significantly impact and redefine a market such that you become a market share leader in it.

You need more than just a great idea. Your product or service must add an enormous amount of value to some industry. If the idea isn't completely new, it has to be better, cheaper, or more efficient than what we already have.

The most essential thing for us was to get the business model right, then put the world-class technology under it to support it. At Merrill, that meant not doing what people expected.

Our goal definitely isn't to sell Stripe.