She was listed as one of the “20 People Who Will Change the World” by Time Magazine.
This book is a wonderful collection of interviews with startup founders. It is written by Bill Gates and Paul Graham, the two biggest names in the industry. The book is one of my favorites.
Jessica Livingston is an American computer scientist, entrepreneur, and feminist. She is the co-founder and CTO of Confluent, a company known for its open-source messaging tool, Kue (formerly known as Confluent Platform).
21 Jessica Livingston Quotes
Jessica Livingston stated that the machines used by Google are quite ordinary and ordinary computers, but they can be quite unreliable.
A few years ago I would have agreed that we don’t know what the future will be like. But after spending a year working in a startup that failed (in which a significant part was developing a feature I was supposed to present to a big tech company), I can see where people get stuck when they are asked to predict the future.
This statement was made by Jessica Livingston on the 25th of June, 2014, in a podcast with the founder of AngelList where she was talking about the acquisition of Upstart, the incubator that she helped to create and that Upstart later acquired.
Innovation has always been a key part of the way we work. It’s exciting to think about what’s around the corner and how the way we work will change as a result.
Jessica, Steve is being very generous by prepaying your royalties. After we ship the first few hundred thousand copies of your book, you’ll get your royalty checks for a long time, in the form of a prepayment.
The ‘one thing’ you mentioned is a key part of agile. The idea is to continually test and improve. This is a key part of the agile process. This way, you can determine exactly what works and what doesn’t. Once you identify the issue, you can make any adjustments needed and try the new iteration. So, the ‘one thing’ is a key part of agile.
Jessica Livingston suggests that teachers should make sure that their students are exposed to technology. Her advice is to make sure that this is related to what is going on in the real world.
The best way to make a new kind of invention is to just make it. The problem with software patents is that they encourage the patenting of all-too-obvious inventions. Also, patents are public, and thus you never know whether someone has used it or not, which is why they don’t make good patents.
It is very unlikely that the founders
you interviewed will be super human. The chances
of them being super humans are extremely small.
I’m going to go through a couple of reasons.
10th of 21 Jessica Livingston Quotes
People who are doing big stuff often think about technology, but if you want to build a business that is going to last, you need to think about technology from the customer’s perspective.
Jessica Livingston has a fantastic attitude. She doesn’t care about the technologies she uses, she cares about her users and making their lives easier.
I like very much the idea of building a business you can’t leave without success.
I think these companies are good bets for the future. I wish I had done as much as they are doing.
I recommend you write a small program to parse a string, and then an even larger program to rewrite the string. Or, if you’re a little lazy, just copy/paste the whole thing into your editor and then rewrite it.
Creating a plan for your startup is a must for almost all new businesses. It helps you to outline your strategic goal and plan.
The reason why a startup has to have three to four people is because they need a lot of help. They need people to help them out and they need a lot of people to talk to. They need feedback which comes in the form of bugs, or questions. If you have just three people, you’re limited to a maximum of three things at any time.
I hope you enjoyed that small recap of what we covered today.
Until the next time!
It is worth mentioning that some people have different views about this sentence. One of them is: I can apply the same approach to software development, too.
I don’t think that being honest just for the sake of being honest is always the correct thing to do, but living in a more ethical manner without compromising my beliefs is the best course of action for me personally.
16th of 21 Jessica Livingston Quotes
There are a lot of reasons I like to be around innovators. I love to ask questions and try to understand what they’re thinking. They bring a lot of passion into their work and life which is contagious. They can be a bit crazy but usually in a productive way. I like to keep their best practices in mind and try to understand how I could incorporate them into my way of work.
The first idea is just a catalyst for starting something and then, you start developing it and finding out if its going to work or not, and then you need to adjust on it, and then you have a panic, you’re thinking you’re going to have regret that you don’t have it already, and then you have more of a good idea for the next steps.
It’s true that professional programmers have not been particularly diligent because they haven’t cared about quality. But I think that it’s because programming has not been a professional field yet.
In other words, performance is what you do with no other distractions. Appearance is what you do while you are doing other things.
Livingston had a tense exchange with her husband while she was pregnant (with the second of three kids) and he was in Singapore. He said something like “you’re going to have a baby anyway so if you want me to quit my job, then quit your job.” She found out she was pregnant right after he said that.
What we hear a lot is that if you don’t start investing today, you won’t have enough money to retire.
Summary
Jessica Livingston, CEO & Co-Founder of General Catalyst, said “Great companies are built by great people”. She said this at the 2017 Women in VC Summit, which was held at the Yale Club of New York on February 20th, 2017.