Quotes from Scott Cook

People don't place their trust in government or company pension plans they have to be self-reliant.

If following your passion to a place where there's no pain probably isn't the business, I don't think an entrepreneur can sustain in a place where you don't have passion.

Today more people believe in UFOs than believe that Social Security will take care of their retirement.

People pitch me all the time. But hopefully, you'll just go ahead and do it. We are trying to eliminate the need for pitches. I'd rather sit there and applaud. Customers buy products, not Powerpoint presentations.

You're kind of taught that the role of a business person is the decision making.

A lot of companies have teams, but they are not really independent. They still have to get stuff approved by the boss. You have to change how and where decisions are made. If the hierarchy makes the decision, it will be based on politics.

We're still in the first minutes of the first day of the Internet revolution.

A whole generation of Americans will retire in poverty instead of prosperity, because they simply are not preparing for retirement now.

Dig for feedback on yourself. You need to have the courage to ask for feedback. You need to learn how you can learn how to grow. It is important that you are going to be a lifelong learner.

Behind every successful enterprise, there is a supporting wife and surprised in-laws.

The current institutionally provided retirement plans will not cover people's needs upon retirement.

Be dramatically willing to focus on the customer at all costs, even at the cost of obsoleting your own stuff.

What I teach our people is that, as a leader, you have four key roles apart from people management. First is to champion the grand vision. Two, install systems and a culture to run experiments. The third thing is to savour surprises. The fourth thing is that even a leader's ideas need to be subjected to tests.

The most important skill you need is the ability to learn how to change and grow.

When you love someone deeply, you give strength, and when you are loved deeply, you gain courage.

As you grow as a company, you get layers and hierarchy that, in theory, should make your decisions a lot better. They get reviewed, and thoughtful people look at decision.

People don't place their trust in government or company pension plans they have to be self-reliant.

We're still in the first minutes of the first day of the Internet revolution.

Thirty to 40 years ago, most financial decisions were fairly simple.

Technology is similarly just a catalyst at times for fundamental forces already present.

QuickBooks - the very fact that we could even dream to make something in the business arena, and that it would then succeed - was a total revolution to me.

I spent some time studying Toyota, because how could a loom maker - they made looms. That was their business for 50 years, 35 years - and then they decided to go into the car business after everyone else was in the car business.

Technology is similarly just a catalyst at times for fundamental forces already present.

If you give the boss all the decision-making power, they see the world through their eyes. The big innovations are generally such a shift that they won't see it. For a long time, it looked like it was just inevitable that you would get slow and bureaucratic.