Top 96 Quotes & Sayings by Glenn Kelman

Those in technology who can afford to stay in Silicon Valley all know it as one of the most beautiful places to live in the world, but a wariness has sunk in as folks from other walks of life are forced to leave: coffee shops are wall-to-wall with aspiring entrepreneurs, and restaurants buzz with talk of valuations and venture capital.

I just don't like bullies. Especially hypocritical bullies.

The core hacker premise that 'code wins arguments' is just another way of saying that anything is worth trying, regardless of whether it is a conservative or liberal idea, and that whatever works is worth keeping.

When we talk about a city's cost of living, we don't mean food, transportation, or clothing, which cost about the same everywhere. We mean housing.

The tech industry's love for scrappy, accessible founders adds to the pressure. You're expected to lead by example, to roll up your sleeves, to know everything going on.

Behind the driven person is just an enormous amount of misery. You have to be miserable with the status quo to want to change it.

Employers are as sensitive to housing costs as their employees, which is why, when we build more houses, we create more jobs.

Steve Jobs knows how to hold his hand out, to build beautiful products and make people pay for them.

Every firing happens differently except in this one respect: the person being fired can't believe how fast it happens.

When I was 28, running products for a company I'd co-founded, the CEO called to say that I had a problem with the board, that I probably couldn't overcome it, that I'd have to leave the company.

Control of the browser that people use to access the Web turned out to be far less meaningful than the search engine we use as the starting point for finding Web information. I switch between Safari, Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome browsers all day. I never stray from Google search.

If your values don't alienate anyone, it is just platitude.

When I was still settling into being a CEO, I wasted a lot of time driving initiatives designed to please others, acting as if someone wouldn't let me do what I wanted to do with Redfin.

Slow investing can have the same impact on startups that slow food has had on cuisine: good things come to those who wait.

It's important for a CEO to feel lucky.

I think the corporate world is pretty starved for personality. The reason you have comic strips like 'Dilbert' and sitcoms like 'The Office' is that people just can't be genuine human beings in a corporate environment. So if you can really be your own self, even if it's a little bit different, I think people are really drawn to that.

Startups alternate between nostalgia for the garage and millennial longing for a lucrative exit. But what I always keep in mind is how disconnected and purposeless I felt before Redfin or my earlier startup, Plumtree. All I ever wanted was to get into a situation where I could win. Everybody has that dream.

Short of a space-alien invasion or an Oklahoma tornado, there is almost no problem that a democracy can tackle in a year. But that isn't why we have a government. We have a government to solve the problems that greedy, short-sighted businessmen like me can't.

Many of the ex-hippies who started companies like Apple, or the early online bulletin boards dedicated to organic food and following the Grateful Dead, were an odd combination of liberals and libertarians.

I think the company that has the clearest set of values is Amazon. That company knows what it is. It may be that it's not your cup of tea, but every single person at that company knows what the Amazon values are.

It's hard to improve our schools. It's hard to redistribute wealth created by the concentration of technological and financial power or to increase middle-class wages. But it might be easier to lower middle-class costs by building more housing.

Almost everything is interesting if you work at it.

Whereas any political party, and nearly all voters, prize consistency as a sign of authentic, values-driven thinking, it is deeply alien to the hacker, who holds that changing your mind is simply intelligence in action.

Even though I am sympathetic to newspapers, I am not entirely convinced by the newspapers' claim that Google News violates fair use standards in posting snippets from news articles on its site.

We need to create technologies - and a culture of respect, and an updated legal doctrine, too - that allow creative folks to make money from their own efforts.

Most CEOs walk around the office like we own the place, without realizing that the place itself isn't worth owning: a business's value comes from the people who walk out the door every night, who have to decide each morning whether to walk back in. One of the simplest things you can do as a leader is honor their choice and appreciate their work.

Folks are leaving Silicon Valley, mostly because they can't afford to stay.

I'm an identical twin, and I felt that with my twin brother, we sort of formed this unassailable force, and it gave me the confidence to be different. Even if I was a goofball, my twin brother was a goofball with me, so I didn't have to worry about fitting in as much. I was able to march to my own drummer.

Once you become more like Madison Avenue, you become acutely sensitive to what's going to annoy your clients.

I learned that sometimes you should just tell people the ugliest things about you because those are the things that people trust the most.

When I was trying to write a novel, I ran out of money, and I was delivering packages on a bicycle. And I finally connected with these guys who started a software company, and almost serendipitously fell into that. I felt like they were goofy guys and that I was a goofy guy.

If you actually believe in free speech and not simply the free distribution of other people's intellectual property, you should let journalists, law firms, and investors exercise their rights to it alongside your own.

The problem for new businesses isn't corporate taxes. Anyone who has actually started a new business knows you don't make enough money for years to pay any meaningful tax on it.

Most of the tech CEOs I know used to think that moving to the Midwest or the South was beneath us, a good tactic for the Boeings of the world who don't need the kind of rare skills we depend on, who have to grub for profits when we reach for growth. But if Amazon can't afford to keep growing in Seattle, who can?

So many tech companies have embraced a mission that they say is larger than profits. Once you wrap yourself up in a moral flag, you have to carry it to the top of other hills.

Many of the libertarian entrepreneurs who only want the government to leave them alone have simply forgotten how important government research, public education, and immigration policy are to Silicon Valley's long-term success.

In some ways, it's better to be undervalued a little than overvalued a lot, just because it's still easy to believe our best days are ahead of us.

If we don't give the authors of music, film, literature, and journalism a way to control the distribution of their goods, the quality of all of these creative efforts will decline.

Growing up is mostly the process of having to acknowledge the differences between your world and the whole world.

Startups can be the most conservative organizations in the world. We spend so much energy nurturing our delicate egos against naysayers and self-doubt that we can hardly admit mistakes. This is especially true of first-time CEOs.

With Facebook's IPO, the world learned a new way of organizing businesses around one overriding imperative: to ship new products quickly.

Almost nothing can make you more miserable than when your company is struggling, and only then do you realize that this is exactly when it's almost impossible for a CEO to quit.

In 2006, I appeared before a House subcommittee considering real estate reform. It was like visiting the capital for the 'Hunger Games' as an outsider in a glamorous and byzantine fairy tale: I couldn't believe how beautiful all the congressional aides were, and I never understood the system of bells and alarms warning legislators to vote.

If you build a better mousetrap, regardless of your marketing budget, the world will beat its own path to your door.

At different points, I applied to graduate school. I got into medical school. I thought about being a writer. I thought about being an investment banker. I just didn't know what I wanted to do with myself. I think the thing that best suits me about being a C.E.O. is that you get to exercise many different talents and wear many different hats.

I am not excited about Bitcoin. I think it's an outrage that, in an era of global warming, there are racks of servers next to the Columbia River. I wish I could explain to the salmon that we've created a dam generating hydroelectric power so that we can generate a fake currency.

What employing thousands of people in the middle of the country has taught me is how good and hard-working Americans in all cities are, and how much most of the country resents our wealthiest cities' sense of entitlement and condescension.

The really basic stuff that fuels 30-year job booms almost always comes from government research, stuff like biotech, the transistor, the Internet. The idea that private capital can handle the early spade work is a joke.

After a young adulthood trying to get him to see the world for how it really is, my brother Wes and I have come back to the way our dad is, realizing that it's sometimes our job to see the world as it could be, as we want it to be.

VCs are good at asking questions.

From squalls, jibes, and other sudden calamities, I learned you don't always get to decide when you've got to make a decision.

I often think about what my replacement will do after I'm fired. She won't have emotional commitments to decisions that I already regret.

We need a government policy all-out in favor of more, denser housing.

Funny money has always been the reason housing prices have risen too fast. First, it was liar loans and negative-amortizing mortgages, where the total amount you owed increased rather than decreased every month. We all know how that ended, with the global financial crisis of 2008.

Any educated person recognizes that curiosity and creativity aren't just important; they are among the essential human activities.

I wish I was as smart as Jeff Bezos. He's just a large-brained space alien.

I wish I was as annotative as Elon Musk.

What's most revolutionary about Uber is not the tool that consumers use but the fact that the only equipment needed by its drivers is their iPhone.

As a captain of industry, I would prefer more tax breaks to help people buy houses, but as a citizen, I realize someone has to pay.

When my brother and I were 11, our father designed a 17-foot boat for sailing around the world. He'd never ventured more than a few miles from the U.S. He'd never sailed - or designed a boat before.