Jessica Livingston Quotations

Cofounders will endure so much together that their relationship is often compared to a marriage.

Programmers have not been professionals because they haven't really cared about quality.

You've got to say you are a step ahead of where you actually are to move to the step that you want to be at.

Pick a big enough project, something that's really hard, something that over the years you can work on.

The one thing we learned over 5 years is that nothing works better than just improving your product.

Investors, most of them, have a herd mentality. They want to invest only if other people are investing

Finding a technical cofounder would have been difficult for me. I was an English major and didn't know any computer programmers.

Finding a programmer to work with if you don't already know one will be a challenge. Merely judging if a programmer is exceptional vs. competent will be very hard if you are not one yourself. When you do find someone, work together informally for a while to test your compatibility.

My skills weren't that I knew how to design a floppy disk, I knew how to design a printer interface, I knew how to design a modem interface; it was that, when the time came and I had to get one done, I would design my own, fresh, without knowing how other people do it. That was another thing that made me very good. All the best things that I did at Apple came from (a) not having money, and (b) not having done it before, ever. Every single thing that we came out with that was really great, I'd never once done that thing in my life.

Innovations seem inevitable in retrospect, but at the time it's an uphill battle.

Lots of people were skeptical, but that's always true when you do something that hasn't been done before.

People like the idea of innovation in the abstract, but when you present them with any specific innovation, they tend to reject it because it doesn't fit with what they already know.

The media often glamorizes successful founders and makes their paths seem easier than they actually were.

Starting a startup is a process of trial and error. What guided the founders through this process was their empathy for the users. They never lost sight of making things that people would want.