Quotes from Scott Cook

So I think instead of focusing on the competition, focus on the customer.

Fifty years ago wealth was stored and transmitted physically through gold bars, stock certificates, bank notes, and coins.

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

Now we teach our leaders that it's your job to put in the systems that enable your people to run your experiments fast and cheap and to keep making them faster and cheaper. Yield as many of your decisions off to the experiment as possible.

Even some of the greatest technology-led revolutions, or allegedly technology-led, really were only made possible because of trends already present.

Spend time with the customers, immersing yourselves, watching. Spend time at their homes. Hear what they say, but most importantly, watch their behaviors as the indication of where the pain is. And then go solve that pain.

Mutual funds were created to make investing easy, so consumers wouldn't have to be burdened with picking individual stocks.

Our first product was Quicken, which is personal financial management on a PC. It had a tough start, and we ran some tracking surveys to understand who was using it. Half the users claimed to use it in some sort of office environment. We ignored that. I thought it was meaningless.

In my view, product/market fit is the most important thing to get right as a startup entrepreneur. There's a variety of ways to do it, but without solving some pain point that the customer gets so excited about they tell their friends, it's really hard in the modern age to get any liftoff.