Randall E. Stross > Quotes

“Graham excuses himself for a moment to go over to his laptop and look up what he had written in his notes after their interview. When he returns, he reports that he had written the following: “Insanely energetic founders. Fund for the new idea.” So Graham is not going to be the one who encourages them to pursue”
― Randall E. Stross, The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator

“As the other startups do at the end of their presentations, Shen offers to the batch the expertise of his team's members: "Kalvin and Randy are developers," he says, and as for himself, he knows how to stay motivated in the face of rejection. "I've gotten rejected thirty days in a row," he says, a reference to his putting himself through "Rejection Therapy," in which one must make unreasonable requests so that one is rejected by a different person, at least once, every single day- inuring one to the pain of rejection. (One example of Shen's first bid to be rejected: he asked a flight attendant if he could move up to first class for free. In another case, he saw an attractive woman on the train and decided he would ask her for her phone number, and when she would turn him down, he would have fulfilled the day's required quota of rejection. He sat near her, fell into a conversation, and when they got off the train and he asked for her number, she said, "Sure." He categorized this as "Failed Rejection.") "So if you need to get pumped up for your sales calls, talk to me. p121”
― Randall E. Stross, The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's Most Exclusive School for Startups

“Bell invented the telephone while tinkering with acoustic telegraphy; Edison invented the phonograph while tinkering with the telephone.”
― Randall E. Stross, The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World

“HAVING ONE’S OWN shop, working on projects of one’s own choosing, making enough money today so one could do the same tomorrow: These were the modest goals of Thomas Edison when he struck out on his own as full-time inventor and manufacturer. The grand goal was nothing other than enjoying the autonomy of entrepreneur and forestalling a return to the servitude of employee.”
― Randall E. Stross, The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World

“in memos as “senior NeXT exposure,” that is, the presence of Jobs himself. The competition also noticed the phenomenon. Field sales representatives for Sun found that their smooth progress in working an account would be thrown in turmoil when Jobs would present himself and sway the customer to consider the NeXT.”
― Randall E. Stross, Steve Jobs & The NeXT Big Thing

“Graham conveys the sense that good ideas are plentiful, waiting for someone to come along and pluck them off the ground. “There’s a bunch of things like that,” he says.”
― Randall E. Stross, The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator

“In Edison’s time, the term “bugs” was used exactly as it is today. In”
― Randall E. Stross, The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World

“There Apple would provide housing, company stores, recreational facilities, complete immersion in Apple culture. His model was Disney World, a state within a state, with its own fire and police departments.90 Appletown was never built”
― Randall E. Stross, Steve Jobs & The NeXT Big Thing

“way out, Greenberg told a couple of the”
― Randall E. Stross, eBoys: The First Inside Account of Venture Capitalists at Work

“(The pen would enjoy a second life years later, in the 1890s, when converted into the first electric tattoo needle.)”
― Randall E. Stross, The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World

“In short, Steve Jobs said the country needed more people like Steve Jobs.”
― Randall E. Stross, Steve Jobs & The NeXT Big Thing

“his own willingness to practice Morse code “about 18 hours a day.” (Edison’s capacity for extended bursts of work would be his principal vanity his entire life.) This intensive tutelage soon enabled him to become a professional telegraph operator.”
― Randall E. Stross, The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World

“many of his pranks involved electric shock—these stunts gain interest in retrospect, knowing as we do of Edison’s future work on the ultimate instrument of shock, the electric chair. In”
― Randall E. Stross, The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World

“He hired a full-time interior designer as one of the first ten employees of NeXT.”
― Randall E. Stross, Steve Jobs & The NeXT Big Thing

“Nor did he regard his partial deafness as an impediment. He claimed that the deafness was actually an advantage, freeing him from time-wasting small talk and giving him undisturbed time to “think out my problems.” Late in life he would say that he was fortunate to have been spared “all the foolish conversation and other meaningless sounds that normal people hear.”
― Randall E. Stross, The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World

“Could any city import the resources needed to create a startup hub? [Paul] Graham took up the question in 2006 and pondered what would make, say, Buffalo, New York, into a Silicon Valley. To Graham, it was strictly a matter of enticing ten thousand people—“the right ten thousand people.” Perhaps five hundred would be enough, or even thirty, if Graham were to be permitted to pick them. Three years later, he suggested that a municipality offer to invest a million dollars each in one thousand startups. The capital required for such a scheme should not seem daunting: “For the price of a football stadium, any town that was decent to live in could make itself one of the biggest startup hubs in the world,” he said.



Any place that wants to become a startup hub needs to understand, however, that it requires welcoming hackers and their unruliness. Unruliness is also “the essence of Americanness,” Graham maintains. “It is no accident that Silicon Valley is in America, and not France, or Germany, or England, or Japan. In those countries, people color inside the lines.” In America, too, failure in business is accommodated. Graham has consistently argued that few people are well suited for starting a startup but that the only effective way of determining who does excel is by having lots of people try: “As long as you’re at a point in your life when you can bear the risk of failure, the best way to find out if you’re suited to running a startup is to try it.”
― Randall E. Stross, The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's Most Exclusive School for Startups

“On a daily basis the venture capitalist was not concerned with historical impact; he worked to create wealth for himself and his limited partners. However, among the Benchmark partners there was awareness that framing one’s professional raison d’être in the language of financial return meant that one was hostage to the vagaries of the market—and even when the market is buoyant, there is little that is soul-quenching about mere numbers. “The really big wins are where all the rewards come from,” Bob Kagle once pointed out, before eBay had gone public. The rewards he was referring to were the emotional ones, not the financial ones, and they were rewards derived not from a game of assuming personal risk—the venture guys had a portfolio across which risk could be spread—but from being backers of entrepreneurs, the ones who commercialized new technology and introduced new products and services—and were the ones who really took on risk. “Nine times out of ten they’re taking on some big, established system of some sort.” He dropped his voice for emphasis: If the individual entrepreneur won, even for the venture guys it produced an “exhilarating feeling”—he groped for the right words—“it’s confirmation that one person with courage can make a difference.” This was the minidrama Kagle and his colleagues had seen play out triumphantly again and again. The work itself did not have any neat demarcations of beginning, middle, and end. The funds seemed to be evergreen, fresh capital materializing as soon as the till was exhausted. The calendars of the partners, revolving as they did around looking at new business plans, meeting new entrepreneurs, considering new deals, gave a feeling of perennially beginning afresh. For them, it was the best place in the cosmos to get the first peek at the future.”
― Randall E. Stross, eBoys: The First Inside Account of Venture Capitalists at Work

“Young Bell and Edison were the same age, each improving the major invention that the other had come up with first, Edison following Bell, then Bell following Edison. Edison, in fact, had been close to devising a working telephone himself. After Bell’s success, the next best thing for Edison was to come up with an indispensable improvement, the carbon transmitter that captured the human voice far better than Bell’s magnetic design. Edison”
― Randall E. Stross, The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World

“Launch Fast” is Paul Graham’s mantra. Move from the idea to a minimally functional product as quickly as possible. Only by getting a product into the hands of customers, even if the product is only a prototype, is it possible to know what customers want.1 Launching fast is how to make something people want. Judging by the advice that they”
― Randall E. Stross, The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator

“The collective value of a typical venture capital portfolio will go down before it goes up—the pattern is called the J curve—because the companies that are not going to survive die before the best performers begin to shine and pull the value of the portfolio up with them. That,”
― Randall E. Stross, eBoys: The First Inside Account of Venture Capitalists at Work

“In Silicon Valley, most engineers work on projects that will never be completed- this holds true at large companies as well as small. If engineers are lucky enough to witness the rare day when the product is completed and launched, they will, in the overwhelming majority of cases, witness the product's failure in the marketplace.”
― Randall E. Stross, Planet Google: One Company's Audacious Plan To Organize Everything We Know

“In the internal NeXT lexicon, this pattern of initial hiring hailed as the very best, followed by disparagement as hopelessly incompetent, was referred to by the shorthand phrase “The Hero-Shithead Roller Coaster.”
― Randall E. Stross, Steve Jobs & The NeXT Big Thing

“Edison’s admirers endowed him with fantastical powers that would permit him to invent anything he wished (one”
― Randall E. Stross, The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World

“The Jobs-designed factory obliterated the difference in white-collar/blue-collar work environments found everywhere else; NeXT factory employees in Fremont worked amidst luxury equal to what the employees in the Palo Alto office enjoyed.”
― Randall E. Stross, Steve Jobs & The NeXT Big Thing

“But one immediate benefit of the press’s marveling was that the extensive coverage supplied Edison with creative ideas about how the phonograph could be adapted for many more uses than telegraphy or senatorial speeches.”
― Randall E. Stross, The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World

“invention should not be pursued as an exercise in technical cleverness, but should be shaped by commercial needs.”
― Randall E. Stross, The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World

“When software developers approached NeXT about bringing out a NeXT version of existing software that ran on other kinds of computers, Jobs turned them away in almost all cases.”
― Randall E. Stross, Steve Jobs & The NeXT Big Thing

“advice: “In general, don’t hide your disasters. We’re not going to take the money back.” He says this lightly, as if delivering a joke, but it is reassuring for the founders to hear. They laugh, perhaps with a touch of relief.”
― Randall E. Stross, The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator

“The University of California at Berkeley received gratis so much computer equipment that much of it went underutilized; one donated workstation discovered in a faculty member’s office was used exclusively as a space heater because its circuitry generated considerable heat.”
― Randall E. Stross, Steve Jobs & The NeXT Big Thing