Antonio García Martinez Quotes

“If the world really does end, there aren't going to be many places to run.”

“The harsh reality is this: to have influence in the world, you need to be willing and able to reward your friends and punish your enemies.”

“The monumental hubris of assuming that the cure for our social ills lies in some as-yet uninvented future, rather than some forgotten past.”

“A 'pivot' is supposed to recall a ballerina’s demi détourné, a delicate change of course as graceful as it (hopefully) seems intentional. In reality, a startup’s pivot is a panicked sprint comparable to that of a Titanic passenger who’s spotted the last open life raft.”

“All ambitious men want either to please their fathers or to punch them in the goddamned face.”

“As in life, so in business: maintain a bias for action over inaction.”

“By itself, genius can produce original thoughts just as little as a woman by herself can bear children. Outward circumstances must come to fructify genius, and be, as it were, a father to its progeny.”

“Cynicism is the last refuge of the shiftless.”

“Dedication to all my enemies: I could not have done it without you.”

“Don’t work for the survivors or architects of massacres. You’ll live just long enough to regret it.”

“Every Jobs has his Wozniak.”

“Have a mad vision, and you’re a kook. Get a crowd to believe in it as well, and you’re a leader.”

“Ideas without implementation, or without an exceptional team to implement them, are like assholes and opinions: everyone’s got one.”

“If we don’t create the thing that kills Facebook, someone else will.”

“It’s not the rats who first abandon a sinking ship. It’s the crew members who know how to swim.”

“Marketing is like sex: only losers pay for it.”

“Men with nothing to lose will stop at nothing to win.”

“Most managers are incompetent and maintain their jobs via inertia and politics.”

“Real-life experience is instructive, but the tuition is high.”

“Startups are experiments in group psychology. As CEO, you’re both the therapist leader, and the patient most in need of therapy.”

“The classic sign of a shitty startup idea is that it requires at least two (or more!) miracles to succeed.”

“The post-Enlightenment man living in a liberal democracy believes he has a right to an opinion; post-Facebook, he also believes he has a right to his own reality.”

“The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a forgotten crime, as the crime was properly done.”

“There’s a cliché in the Valley that doing a startup is like jumping off a cliff and building an airplane on the way down. How high the cliff is and how much time you have before death are a pure function of how much money you’ve raised. In our case, someone was also shooting at us with an antiaircraft battery.”

“To quote one Valley sage, if your idea is any good, it won’t get stolen, you’ll have to jam it down people’s throats instead.”