Scalability Quotes

When e-commerce companies build scale, cost comes down. Companies that can handle scale and reduce costs over time will win. Margins will come from reducing costs over time and not by increasing prices. Technology is the answer at large scale.

Growth is always essential. Running any tech company, you want to make sure you're growing. Putting in place all of the right structure to be able to ensure growth.

For decades, technology entrepreneurship has been revered, and people like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk were heroes.

I think that's exactly what Silicon Valley was all about in those days. Let's do a startup in our parents' garage and try to create a business.

What's the problem you solve? Solve it for one person. Create a system to do it without you. Duplicate.

When you start a company, it's more an art than a science because it's totally unknown. Instead of solving high-profile problems, try to solve something that's deeply personal to you. Ideally, if you're an ordinary person and you've just solved your problem, you might have solved the problem for millions of people.

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

It's really easy to create a $1 billion company - you just have to solve a $10 billion problem.

Technology ventures can succeed with very little investment, unlike many other industries. A lot of the big Internet players like Google or Yahoo were started by a couple of guys with computers. Microsoft was started in Bill Gates' garage.

I think Unix is a great system - especially for running data centers - because it is very mature, very reliable, very scalable. But when I want to go out and populate small devices, I think Java.

On the Internet, companies are scale businesses, characterized by high fixed costs and relatively low variable costs. You can be two sizes: You can be big, or you can be small. It's very hard to be medium. A lot of medium-sized companies had the financing rug pulled out from under them before they could get big.

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

Technological innovations [in public health] that come from basic science have to be transformed from discovery to delivery, and that gap is huge.

Our legacy platforms have served us well for decades, but we're running out of upgrades that will keep us ahead. Technology is changing too fast, and our enemies are too adaptable.

TNC was once limited by the resources it could directly marshal to buy land. But teaching people a new idea is incredibly more scalable.

In the early days, start-ups make the main mistake of hiring people to do the work that they could do themselves.

In 2000, when my partner Ben Horowitz was CEO of the first cloud computing company, Loudcloud, the cost of a customer running a basic Internet application was approximately $150,000 a month.

For a startup, you need to stay small so the others don't attack, or you aim to be one of the big guys. If you don't do it right, you might lose everything.

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

If you ask me, 'So what is your business model?' Our business model's always about shifting to higher value opportunities.

The industry trend is that everything is moving to the cloud, and most of our customers are in this very heterogeneous world.

In technology, most things fail. Most companies fail.

Whining isn't a scalable solution.

The laws of business physics have been broken in terms of how many customers you can acquire and how fast. No one in history has ever acquired 450 million customers in the same amount of time that WhatsApp did.

In America, when you bring an idea to market, you usually have several months before competition pops up, allowing you to capture significant market share. In China, you can have hundreds of competitors within the first hours of going live. Ideas are not important in China - execution is.