Strategy

“In the AI world, at least, strategy is a somewhat overrated concept, and what I mean by that is...”

“I think it's always good to overestimate your competitor's capabilities and then figure out your strategy in a world where they have those capabilities.”

“The most important thing for the company is the strategy. So I think if the execution is like 80%, okay, and a good strategy, you will still win.”

“Sometimes the best strategy isn't the most sophisticated one. It's the one bold enough to cut through the noise and force immediate market response.”

“Strategy is literally saying no to a bunch of things that are great ideas. It's never actually saying no to, you know, bad ideas. Like, you already weed those out.”

“Your experience and your strategy, remember my minivan story, is becoming a commodity.”

“Strategy involves making choices to do some things and not other things. And it is often intimidating to say, you know, oh dear, I have to cut these things off and not do them and actually make a decision that I'll be held accountable for potentially, or I'll …”

“Because our brand is very well defined. Our values are very well defined. What we're doing is very well defined. So you don't have your strategy cannot change like drastically. Right? So it's a constant ongoing of improvements.”

“So what I believe in is if you could spend your time doing anything, I spend 80% or more of your time on your strategy and on your rituals. Like, those are the two things I really believe in.”

“Even before you have product market fit, It's worth thinking about strategy. Now it's not strategy in the sense of sort of this fully articulated strategic planning. We're going to do this. These are going to be the competitors. This is going to, how we're goi…”

“In, in the, this takeoff phase in a business when, that we talked about before, when you're trying to attain competitive position, operational excellence is everything. And so, so in, if you think of not strategy, not statically endpoints like Professor Porter…”

“These are analytical tools for analyzing the problem, for thinking about things, for looking at competition, but they're not strategy.”

“All three elements have to be there. You have to be an understanding of the situation. There has to be a guiding policy. How are we going to deal with it? And that can be a long-term sense of how we compete. I mean, you don't have to change your strategy every…”

“For a strategy, you need to exploit an asymmetry of some kind. You're a little faster. Oh, they're alone. Something has to be different between the sort of things. So that's the beginning of power is a symmetry. We can think of it as leverage.”

“It's very hard to think strategically about the situation you're in, because there isn't a science of strategy. It's not like physics. It's not like engineering, where we can write down the equations of stress on a beam and say, how thick does the beam have to…”

“My two pieces of advice to anybody that's actually trying to do this is A, state the problem, and B, don't call it a strategy. Call it an action agenda. That you're not creating a strategy. You're creating an action agenda. What are we going to do about this p…”

“There's this like pervasive belief that there's no strategy anywhere, but I've really come to believe that strategies everywhere. It's just like rarely written.”

“If you just write things down, no matter how bad they are, your strategy will improve almost overnight. But if you don't write it down, it's incredibly challenging to improve your strategy.”

“The first that I end up seeing a lot is just this idea that like, okay, ours are not actually strategy. So, you know, I think the way that, that we plan and the way that our customers plan, the kind of key point is it's critical to disconnect like strategy dis…”

“In many companies, the strategy is just A roadmap on steroids. It's more plan and execute just on a grand scale.”

“Cleverness is actually not your friend when it comes to strategy, because cleverness will make your strategy brittle. You want it to be kind of simple and unclever.”

“The main benefit is that there's a lot of concrete action through a OKR that you don't always get from strategy. Strategy tends to be a little longer, a little more muji-muji, and then when you get the OKR, you say, this quarter is what we're actually going to…”

“When you are a small startup, strategy does not matter because there's not that much of strategy is about. Maybe later on, it might be a fault to think about strategy, but strategy kind of assumes that you can do multiple things at the same time, which small s…”

“Like that's the deep fear why many people procrastinate on strategy, because deep down, they just, they don't know if they can formulate a good strategy. So, so time becomes a convenient excuse for us where we say, well, it's not me. It's just, I don't have ti…”

“You have to combine these two things to understand a business and to do evaluation properly. So in other words, the litmus test of a strategy is that it creates value. And you really can't understand or value a business until you understand the competitive sit…”

“The most powerful question in strategy is what would have to be true? Not what is true. What would have to be true for that to be a great idea?”

“Well, I think about strategy as a set of choices that enables you to invest in a given place. To win, whether that's geography or business or whatever. So it, it's that set of set of choices. And what do I mean by winning? I mean, in the field of play that you…”

“So if you have an operationally incredibly effective company, you're very efficient, but you miss the strategy issue, then in the end, it won't be an attractive business model.”

“And the dangerous thing about that is you don't actually own your strategy till you're generating money.”

“If you get the real story with actual entrepreneurs, what you discover is that even if the vision is right on and they see the future, the specifics of the strategy often have fatal flaws.”

“You don't, you totally agree, you don't want to tell them how to do strategy. I would never do that. And they're going to be better at it. I actually like to think in an early stage company you shouldn't be telling them how to do strategy either”