"When you are first starting out you really need to make your burn-rate ridiculously tiny.
Don't spend more than you are sure you have."
— Wharton Business School talk · on building Zip2 · 1995
"Excessive meetings are the blight of big companies and almost always get worse over time.
Get out of all large meetings, unless you're certain they are providing value to the whole audience."
— Tesla internal memo · 2018
"Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you aren't adding value.
It is not rude to leave. It is rude to make someone stay and waste their time."
— Tesla internal memo · 2018
"Focus on signal over noise. Don't waste time on stuff that doesn't actually make things better."
— on product development philosophy
"First principles is a kind of physics way of looking at the world.
You boil things down to the most fundamental truths and then reason up from there,
as opposed to reasoning by analogy."
— on first-principles thinking
"Eliminate unnecessary processes and let the product development move quickly.
Question why certain processes exist — if they're not helping, they should be reworked or removed."
— productivity framework