Customers who have to come back and spend, or customers who just don’t want the hassle of leaving – those are the ones who are most worth attracting.

I don’t think a true company – one that builds sustainable value – can ever only exist online or remotely.

If we aren’t going to be afraid of conflict, we have to see it as thinking.

On overnight flights, I have trained myself to get to sleep almost instantly after takeoff. I always listen to the same audiobook on my iPod so my brain knows, regardless of time zone, that that voice means it’s time for bed.

As a mother, I work hard every day and I expect that work to be recognized and appreciated. Because I work for and with human beings, sometimes they’re grateful and sometimes they aren’t.

The best remote companies I’ve seen do almost everything online, via email and telephone. But they also get together face to face on a regular basis.

It is nobody’s right to be waited on and nobody’s fate to do the waiting.

If the company depends entirely on you – your creativity, ingenuity, inspiration, salesmanship or charisma – nobody will want to buy it. The risk and the dependency are too great.

Huge open source organizations like Red Hat and Mozilla manage the collaboration of hundreds of people who don’t know one another and have spent no time hanging around the water cooler.

We know – intellectually – that confronting an issue is the only way to resolve it. But any resolution will disrupt the status quo. Given the choice between conflict and change on the one hand, and inertia on the other, the ostrich position can seem very attractive.