Stewart Butterfield Quotes

In any endeavor, you have to understand your tolerance for risk. What's a failure you can afford?

When everybody starts a company, they are so energized and passionate about it. And what happens is that a lot of times maybe that's not sustainable.

I'd love to see more businesses take this approach - intentionally rightsizing themselves. Hit a number that feels good and say, 'Let's stick around here.'

No matter how much you plan and prepare, things can still go wrong.

Rethinking product supply chains offers another opportunity for traditional enterprises to introduce a host of positive outcomes.

While the move to central clearing has made the system safer, we need to make sure that the central counterparties have the resources and risk-management practices to withstand plausible but severe shocks.

When we first started growing our employees, I was scared. I would often think, 'If we had more people, what would they do? Is there really enough work?'

Every business makes big mistakes along the way.

With a lot of the things that seem scalable, you will find bottlenecks you never imagined that you suddenly need to find solutions for.

The Wellcome Trust will retain a level of financial flexibility which will enable us to react quickly to unexpected developments and new ideas.

A good idea is not enough. It must be the fit of a particular idea for a particular entrepreneur and, ideally, unfair advantages in why said particular entrepreneur is going to address said particular idea.

The future of innovation has to include not only the technology, but economic viability.

When you're building a business, you want to focus and deliver excellence at what you do. This simply cannot be done when you are launching multiple ventures, dozens of new products, and selling everywhere and anywhere at the same time.

I've really thought a lot about why other companies fail or succeed. I had to be a student of failure and find out why things went off the rails. I did that at a fairly deep level, and it's still something I do.

I've always been a big believer in diversification for anybody. It's never good to put all of your efforts and all of your time and all of your financial resources into just one project. Diversification is key for any individual and any business.

Risk management systems and controls may discourage or limit certain revenue-generating opportunities. Failure to ensure the independence of these functions from the revenue generators and risk takers has been shown to be dangerous, and this is something for which the board is accountable.

I tell my team you have to aim for success, but assume failure.

Fail to prepare, prepare to fail.

Managing risk is a key variable, frankly, all aspects of life, business is just one of them, and one of the things that most people do in terms of managing risk, that's actually bad thinking, is they think they can manage risk to zero. Everything has some risk to it. You know, you drive your car down the street, a drunk driver may hit you. So what you're doing is you're actually trying to get to an acceptable level of risk.

Then you realize that the preparation and the planning of this small army of people trying to head to the single aim of creating a work that's going to excite people is very risky. Of course, the odds are that it's not going to work out because there are too many possibilities of it going wrong.

Go make yourself a plan And be a shining light. Then make yourself a second plan, For neither will come right.

This idea of having back-up plans is ingrained into us to make us believe that that's the smart thing to do.

A system, artificially stabilized, and of course you have hidden risks under the surface, and you don't know where the risks are.

Everything involves a risk. No risk, no reward.

We haven't got a plan so nothing can go wrong!