Top 50 John Doerr Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Ideas are easy. Execution is everything. It takes a team to win.”

— John Doerr

Featured in: Startup Quotes, Motivational Quotes for Work, Winning Quotes, Teamwork Quotes, Quotes About Ideas

2. “Act now. Act with speed.”

— John Doerr

3. “No conflict, no interest.”

— John Doerr

4. “Your biggest challenge will be building a great team.”

— John Doerr

5. “Entrepreneurs do more than anyone thinks possible, with less than anyone thinks possible.”

— John Doerr

6. “If you can’t invent the future, the next best thing is to fund it.”

— John Doerr

7. “As Jim Collins observes in Good to Great, first you need to get “the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats.” Only then do you turn the wheel and step on the gas.”

— John Doerr

8. “Green-tech could be the largest economic opportunity of the 21st Century.”

— John Doerr

9. “The next wave of the Web is going to be user-generated content.”

— John Doerr

10. “Ideas are easy. Execution is everything.”

— John Doerr

11. “Change the way we teach; Empower teachers.”

— John Doerr

12. “We don’t hire smart people to tell them what to do. We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do. – Steve Jobs.”

— John Doerr

13. “People are looking to have more meaning in their lives. It is a sign the technology community is coming of age.”

— John Doerr

14. “If the reason you’re taking on a mission is for the money you’ll make, I believe you’ll fail.”

— John Doerr

15. “There’s never been a better time than now to start or accelerate a greentech venture.”

— John Doerr

16. “When you are tired of saying it, people are starting to hear it.”

— John Doerr

17. “How do you create jobs? Our companies have generated about 350,000 jobs and that’s good.”

— John Doerr

18. “We must realize – and act on the realization – that if we try to focus on everything, we focus on nothing.”

— John Doerr

19. “You have to have great design to be competitive in today’s markets.”

— John Doerr

20. “First, said Edwin Locke, “hard goals” drive performance more effectively than easy goals. Second, specific hard goals “produce a higher level of output” than vaguely worded ones.”

— John Doerr

21. “We use OKRs to plan what people are going to produce, track their progress vs. plan, and coordinate priorities and milestones between people and teams. We also use OKRs to help people stay focused on the most important goals, and help them avoid being distracted by urgent but less important goals.”

— John Doerr

22. “Bono, do you know the Senegalese proverb ‘If you want to cut a man’s hair, it is better if he is in the room’?” He said it in a loving way, but we didn’t miss the message: Be careful if you think you know what we want. Because we know what we want. You’re not African, and this messiah complex hasn’t always turned out so well.”

— John Doerr

23. “It is quite clear that compelling content, which is made available on economic terms that respect the intellectual rights of owners, can be a tremendous spur to the growth of broadband networks.”

— John Doerr

24. “There’s this large trend – I think the next trend in the Web, sort of Web 2.0 – which is to have users really express, offer, and market their own content, their own persona, their identity.”

— John Doerr

25. “Well, there are more writers of blogs right now than there are readers, so that’s clearly a vanity phenomenon.”

— John Doerr

26. “It’s actually not unlike Google at that stage of development. They had an up-and-running site. It wasn’t losing very much money, it wasn’t making very much money, but it was growing.”

— John Doerr

27. “We all know about blogs and how big they are.”

— John Doerr

28. “Actions – and data – speak louder than words.”

— John Doerr

29. “Peak performance is the product of collaboration and accountability.”

— John Doerr

30. “There are so many people working so hard and achieving so little. – Andy Grove.”

— John Doerr

31. “When people have conflicting priorities or unclear, meaningless, or arbitrarily shifting goals, they become frustrated, cynical, and demotivated.”

— John Doerr

32. “An effective goal-setting system starts with disciplined thinking at the top, with leaders who invest the time and energy to choose what counts.”

— John Doerr

33. “People are the most important thing that we do. We have to try to make them better.”

— John Doerr

34. “Stretch goals can be crushing if people don’t believe they’re achievable.”

— John Doerr

35. “Meritocracy flourishes in sunlight.”

— John Doerr

36. “For anyone striving for high performance in the workplace, goals are very necessary things.”

— John Doerr

37. “Leaders must get across the why as well as the what. Their people need more than milestones for motivation. They are thirsting for meaning, to understand how their goals relate to the mission.”

— John Doerr

38. “What you should do is more counterintuitive: Stop for a moment and shut out the noise. Close your eyes to really see what’s in front of you, and then pick the best way forward for you and your team, relative to the organization’s needs.”

— John Doerr

39. “You can tell people to clean up a mess, but should you be telling them which broom to use? When top management was saying “We’ve got to crush Motorola!” somebody at the bottom might have said “Our benchmarks are lousy; I think I’ll write some better benchmarks.” That was how we worked.”

— John Doerr

40. “Innovation tends to dwell less at the center of an organization than at its edges.”

— John Doerr

41. “As Stephen Covey noted, “If the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster.”

— John Doerr

42. “Acute focus, open sharing, exacting measurement, a license to shoot for the moon – these are the hallmarks of modern goal science.”

— John Doerr

43. “Individuals want to drive their own success. They don’t want to wait till the end of the year to be graded. They want to know how they’re doing while they’re doing it, and also what they need to do differently.”

— John Doerr

44. “The best way to solve a management problem, he believed, was through “creative confrontation” – by facing people “bluntly, directly, and unapologetically.”

— John Doerr

45. “The art of management,” Grove wrote, “lies in the capacity to select from the many activities of seemingly comparable significance the one or two or three that provide leverage well beyond the others and concentrate on them.”

— John Doerr

46. “Bad companies,” Andy wrote, “are destroyed by crisis. Good companies survive them. Great companies are improved by them.”

— John Doerr

47. “For a service business, nothing is more valuable than engaged employees who feel they can make a difference and want to stay with the organization. Turnover is costly. The best turnover is internal turnover, where people are growing their careers within your enterprise rather than moving someplace else. People aren’t wired to be nomads. They just need to find a place where they feel they can make a real impact.”

— John Doerr

48. “Transparency seeds collaboration.”

— John Doerr

49. “Contributors are most engaged when they can actually see how their work contributes to the company’s success. Quarter to quarter, day to day, they look for tangible measures of their achievement. Extrinsic rewards – the year-end bonus check – merely validate what they already know. OKRs speak to something more powerful, the intrinsic value of the work itself.”

— John Doerr

50. “If an objective is well framed, three to five KRs will usually be adequate to reach it.”

— John Doerr