Salim Ismail Quotes

as technology brings us a world of abundance, access will triumph over ownership.

To demonstrate, consider the number of times the founders of the following companies pitched investors before finally succeeding: Company Number of Investor Pitches Skype 40 Cisco 76 Pandora 300 Google 350

Any company designed for success in the 20th century is doomed to failure in the 21st.

An Exponential Organization (ExO) is one whose impact (or output) is disproportionally large — at least 10x larger — compared to its peers because of the use of new organizational techniques that leverage accelerating technologies.

In fact, the best definition we've found for a startup comes from Ries: "A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty."

It is our opinion that in the future, the defining metric for organizations won't be ROI (Return on Investment), but ROL (Return on Learning).

Today, if you're not disrupting yourself, someone else is;

You have to be self-aware and look for that startup idea and purpose that is a perfect fit with you — with you as a person, not as a business[person].

In 2013, Reddit, which has just fifty-one employees, most of whom manage the platform, saw 731 million unique visitors cast 6.7 billion votes on 41 million stories.

According to noted hotelier Chip Conley, "Culture is what happens when the boss leaves."

In the 20th century the big fight was capitalism versus socialism. Now we've got a better fight: who owns the exponential surplus, who owns abundance, and how do we distribute that?

Agents aren't going to be ideological. They're going to be ruthlessly functional.

The educated person who's been promised a future and is watching the ladder collapse — that's the real problem. We need new ladders for meaning, agency, status, and contribution.

We used to have public companies that sold products. Now we have public companies that own entire possibilities.

You don't want to digitize your bureaucracy — you want to delete it.