Hewlett believed that a company had a responsibility to everyone it touched and that the people who worked hard to make the company successful deserved to share in the wealth that they helped create. (Location 148)

“You can go at life as a series of transactions, or you can go at life building relationships,” Bill once told me. “Transactions can give you success, but only relationships make for a great life.” (Location 223)

The real scorecard in life is how well you build meaningful relationships and how well you live to your core values. (Location 250)

One core value that Bill instilled in me is the sacred nature of commitments. “Be very careful what you commit to,” Bill advised. “Because there’s no honorable way to fail a commitment freely made.” (Location 255)

So, if life is short—even if you live one hundred years—the main question isn’t how to extend life as long as possible but how to live a life worth living all the way along, to live a life that you’d feel good about whenever it gets taken away. (Location 297)

You need the right people far more than you need the right business idea, especially since any specific business idea is likely to fail anyway. (Location 346)

Even if you’re an uber-visionary, perhaps even the next Steve Jobs, the single most important skill for building a great company is making superb people decisions. Without the right people, you simply cannot build a great company, (Location 350)

“Early on, all of our movies suck,” wrote Catmull in his book Creativity, Inc. (which I warmly recommend), adding that “all the movies we now think of as brilliant were, at one time, terrible.” Sometimes the Pixar team would even discover that the original story concept had to be jettisoned entirely. Monsters, Inc., for example, began as a story about a man dealing with monsters showing up and following him around, each monster representing an unresolved fear, and it just didn’t work. So, the director and his team reworked the story, over and over, iteration after iteration, until they found just the right formula. (Location 353)

Catmull built Pixar on the idea that the first question is not “What are the great stories to bet on?” The first question should be “Who are the great people to bet on?” (Location 357)

And what’s that metric? The percentage of key seats on the bus filled with the right people for those seats. Stop and think: What percentage of your key seats do you have filled with the right people? If your answer is less than 90 percent, you’ve just identified your number one priority. To build a truly great company, you’ll need to strive for having 90 percent of your key seats filled with the right people. (Location 374)