Quotes about Metrics

In the same way, metrics can record the frequency of our church attendance, the regularity of our Bible reading and the exact amount of our tithing, but they can never gauge the genuineness of any of them, or whether they are any better than "the noise of the solemn assemblies" against which the prophets fulminated.

You can't manage what you can't measure.

In both cases, what it all comes down to is users. You'd think that a company about to buy you would do a lot of research and decide for themselves how valuable your technology was. Not at all. What they go by is the number of users you have.

Treat a startup as an optimization problem in which performance is measured by number of users.

What gets measured gets managed.

When I have my interview with God, our conversation will focus on the individuals whose self-esteem I was able to strengthen, whose faith I was able to reinforce, and whose discomfort I was able to assuage—a doer of good, regardless of what assignment I had. These are the metrics that matter in measuring my life.

Spending is not caring. Spending is what politicians do instead of caring. Spending more does not guarantee success. Politicians like to measure spending because it is easier than measuring actual metrics of accomplishment.

In business, the idea of measuring what you are doing, picking the measurements that count like customer satisfaction and performance... you thrive on that.