IBM

“I tell people to this day, I think the best first job, I don't care what you want to do in life, it's a sales job. Best job. Because you learn how to ask for what you need. You ask for the order, and you learn how to be resilient, and that a no is not the end …”

“Turned out every single CEO of IBM started out in sales.”

“I tell people all the time, women, minorities, go do an international assignment. You will actually have a edge above people who have not been minorities and experienced being minorities in a new culture.”

“Almost all of them had gone and done an international assignment. But more than that, A good chunk of them, a high percentage, had actually gone to Japan. And I thought, that's not obvious. Japan was probably our smallest marketplace.”

“The other thing I learned, and this is from Lou Gerstner, Who said, who had written a whole book on this, and his IBM turnaround, he said, you only have six to nine months to change the culture of a company before you're stuck with it.”

“If I could go back and do it all over again, I would have tried harder from the beginning. To find a co-founding partner. Like before I went to the incubator program, you know, maybe even before I left IBM, I would have taken the time from the very beginning t…”

“As I look back at it was like 27,000 dollars I had earned in my pension plan, and I was like, well, I could take this out and pay the tax penalty, and this is what I'm gonna use to start the company.”

“As opposed to creating building blocks, we wanted to create solutions in verticals. That I think is a mistake as technology shows in the beginning.”

“If I take all the verbal promises, and if you say there's a 125 gigawatts of AI data centers that are going to come online in the next two to three years, that's the eight to 12 trillion of CapEx in total. Not in one year, in total. That is where I come to. I …”

“We actually tripled our college level entry hiring this year. Tripled compared to last year.”

“We're pretty sure that in another month or two, we'll be at double that range, which means you can solve trypsin.”

“Mythos didn't find anything that other models didn't and couldn't find.”

“I would say public cloud is one of them, candidly, that we missed. I would actually turn around and say, despite inventing the IBM PC, client server was another one that we missed.”

“We are not going to be a hyperscaler, which was two of the four you mentioned, and we're not a foundation model provider.”

“Two, we were About 20% software in 2019. We are now about 45%.”

“And now at year four we'll be I think over five billion from a baseline of 22 spent. So that's not an incremental five over last year. That's a incremental saving compared to our year-end 22 spending.”

“After year two, we were definitely getting a return that was 10 X compared to what we were spending.”

“So, and I don't think in a commodity world, there probably isn't space for a dozen foundation models. Is there space for three or four? Probably. But since there's a dozen being run after globally, it tells you that They're not all going to work out.”

“Our software developers are probably 40% more productive today than they were two years ago. So I'm not saying it's one month, over two years, they're 40% more productive.”

“We went too quickly, and we wanted to make a monolithic application. Mistake number one. Mistake number two, we picked a domain, which is perhaps the hardest of them all, which is health. Mistake number three, how many IBMers sell to doctors, and how many IBMe…”