"Though the economics of the business have drastically changed since our purchase of The Buffalo News, I believe newspapers that intensively cover their communities will have a good future. It’s your job to make your paper indispensable to anyone who cares about what is going on in your city or town."

"I used to think the Blazers needed a charismatic, energetic, gunslinger like Kevin Pritchard. But then I was reminded that two of the most respected men in the business -- San Antonio's R.C. Buford and Oklahoma City's Sam Presti -- got their teams in the Western Conference Finals not because they were the life of the party, but rather because they were the smartest people at the party."

"A key phrase to keep in mind in any 5 Why exercise is "people do not fail, processes do"."

"It turns out, like most success stories, the answer was simplifying the service. Taking features out. Reducing the value proposition to a clear and simple use case. This was not done in a vacuum. This was done by releasing a less than perfect product to the market, finding a few customers who wanted a less than perfect product, and then listening carefully to those customers to get to the ideal product."

"Facebook’s management team has always been on-message. But now that it’s a publicly traded company, we can expect that candid, unplanned comments to the press are gone for good. That’s why we hit up the best source for the inside scoop on Facebook — one that’s no longer there. Dustin Moskovitz may have left Facebook to launch his own startup, Asana, but he’s still got plenty to say about the company he co-founded with Mark Zuckerberg."

"It was a nook, really, created by the shape of the building around it and the needs of the air conditioning system when the company’s new headquarters were built. Animator Andrew Gordon discovered it while investigating a human-sized hatch in the back wall of his new office. After finding that the tunnel ended in a ‘lost space’, he decided to start decorating."

"As well as imbuing them with a narrative, successful sellers of handmade and vintage goods take immense care in describing the detail of their goods."

"Revealing influences is the confidence of a true creative person: you can see where the ideas come from, because even with the same ingredients I know you can’t bake what I’m about to with it."

"I just have to much to do to roam around stuff like this. It seems like a great thing. I just can't do it. I killed my facebook page years ago because time clicking around is just dead time. Your brain isn't resting and it isn't doing. I think people have to get their heads around this thing. All this unmitigated input is hurting folks. My opinion."

"AS: During this record, we went back to the verse in "Mr. Tambourine Man", which is a song I was obsessed with when I was 15: "To dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free." We were in the van, coming back from a show, halfway through writing the album, and I remember hearing that verse. We both wanted that feeling to be encapsulated in our record.

"VL: You want the words to create feelings, and also these intense visuals. As a person who writes lyrics, it's not always about literal heartbreak, but rather the negative space and the feelings around it. How do you describe a feeling without saying "this is the feeling"? How do you take something completely natural, that will eventually transfer to the listener, but not just settle for that instant feeling of "you hurt me," and go to an imaginary landscape instead? It's the most intense task.

"And I'm sorry, but musicians are not chefs. You don't like music because of the way it tastes, where [artists] never want to disappoint a paying customer. Music is about your feelings. Stop pleasing people. You please yourself, and if people like it, great. Beach House is our life. Someone asked us, "What are your hobbies?" And there are small things, but this is every day of our lives.

"AS: Beach House was my life before our first album came out. It was weird, because people would always ask, "Why are you doing that all the time?" But now people don't think I'm weird because I play organs all day."

"Beutler Wiki Relations helps you to understand and work cooperatively with Wikipedia and successfully engage similar open-source communities."

"Rather than implying that founders should socialize less and work more (although he may feel that way), Gross was pointing out that it’s often easier to sell a product that intensely appeals to a narrow market than one that loosely appeals to a broad one."

""I wanted to distance myself as far as possible from those pasty-faced corpses in suits I saw in airline-magazine ads," he writes in his 2005 autobiography, "Let My People Go Surfing." "If I had to be a businessman, I was going to do it on my own terms.""

"If there's a question about if it's necessary, remove it."

"9. Excessive side projects. Side projects are like comfort food for coders. I’m a believer in doing a side project here and there to keep burnout at bay. Unfortunately, there was a period where I overdosed on them and was working on enough side projects to rival my real startup. I think it’s particularly easy to fall into this trap when your company is new but not brand new, i.e. traversing the Trough of Sorrow. Better to just suck it up and stay focused on product."

"When talking about Zuckerberg’s most valuable personality trait, a colleague jokingly invokes the famous Stanford marshmallow tests, in which researchers found a correlation between a young child’s ability to delay gratification—devour one treat right away, or wait and be rewarded with two—with high achievement later in life. If Zuckerberg had been one of the Stanford scientists’ subjects, the colleague jokes, Facebook would never have been created: He’d still be sitting in a room somewhere, not eating marshmallows."

"David Chang’s search for the perfect restaurant."

"Kevin Rose and Instagram founder Kevin Systrom sit down to chat about Systrom's growing up with computers, his time spent at Stanford, and landing an internship at a startup destined to be worth billions. This ultimately led to launching his own startup which is now 15 million users strong and one of the fastest growing social networks on the planet!"

"There's basically one thing you have to do: you have to make every single detail perfect, and you have to limit the number of details."

"Too often in technology, design is applied like a veneer after the hard work is done. That approach ignores how essential design is in our lives. Our lives are beset by clutter, not just of physical goods but of ideas and options and instructions—and design, at its best, lets us prioritize. Think of a supremely honed technology: the book. It elegantly organizes information, delivering it in a compact form, easily scanned asynchronously or in one sitting. The ebook is a worthy attempt to reverse-engineer these qualities—a process that has taken decades and chewed up millions in capital. But still, despite the ingenuity and functionality of the Kindle and the Nook, they don’t entirely capture the charms of the original technology. Good design is hard."

"Creating passionate users is NOT about finding ways to make everyone like you. It's about finding ways to use your own passion to inspire passion in others, and anything with that much power is bound to piss off plenty of status-quo/who-moved-my-cheese people. Bring it on."

"See, when you make the wrong decisions in business you lose money but you don’t lose time and time is very precious because we don’t know how much we have."

"The biggest reason we cling to the 8 person focus group, conducted in a grey room in front of a grey mirror with grey people, is that we are dependent on a research supply chain that is broken. And there are four reasons, all mutually dependent and a bit circular, why this chain is broken."

"Don't ignore your dreams; don't work too much; say what you think; cultivate friendships; be happy."

"Jobs may have been impulsive at times, but he was always methodical. This kind of nature suited an autodidact with eclectic tastes, empowering him either to obsess impatiently about a pressing problem that had to be dealt with immediately--much like an engineer--or else to let an idea steep and incubate until he got it right. This is why Jobs was so often right on the big picture, even when he got the details wrong."

"Forty years ago, Willie, Waylon, Jerry Jeff, and a whole host of Texas misfits grew their hair long, snubbed Nashville, and brought the hippies and rednecks together. Country music has never been the same."

“Design must be functional and functionality must be translated into visual aesthetics, without any reliance on gimmicks that have to be explained.”

"If most of the value is now in the initial creative act, there’s little benefit to traditional hierarchical organization that’s designed to deliver the same thing over and over, making only incremental changes over time. What matters is being first and bootstrapping your product into a positive feedback spiral with a constant stream of creative innovation. Hierarchical management doesn’t help with that, because it bottlenecks innovation through the people at the top of the hierarchy, and there’s no reason to expect that those people would be particularly creative about coming up with new products that are dramatically different from existing ones – quite the opposite, in fact. So Valve was designed as a company that would attract the sort of people capable of taking the initial creative step, leave them free to do creative work, and make them want to stay. Consequently, Valve has no formal management or hierarchy at all."

"Intense, emotional, and frequently out of control, the hip-hop superstar Kanye West allowed his antics to turn him into a national joke and to earn him the criticism of two American presidents. Would a massive concert tour with his friend and rival Jay-Z offer the troubled rapper a taste of redemption—or disaster?"

"The commercial world guards its secrets. The game is competitive and money is the prize. The non-profit world, when it is functioning the way it should, upholds a spirit of generosity and common good. The two cultures tend not to mix very well, but Jesse Thorn ("The Sound of Young America," now "Bullseye") has brought to Transom a big-hearted and wise Manifesto in which he tells you how to make good things and, more surprisingly, how to make money at it. He could have kept the secrets to himself. Instead, he wrote "Make Your Thing: 12 Point Program for Absolutely, Positively 1000% No-Fail Guaranteed Success" with fascinating parables from comedy, hip-hop, blogging, cartooning and more. Jesse's own experience stretches across all sorts of independent media and performance. His words are practical and inspirational, and funny. They'll help you do better work. Jesse is donating his secrets in the best non-profit tradition."

"What is the labour encoded in Instagram? It's easy to see. Every "user" of Instagram is a worker. There are some people who produce photos -- this is valuable, it means there is something for people to look it. There are some people who only produce comments or "likes," the virtual society equivalent of apes picking lice off other apes. This is valuable, because people like recognition and are more likely to produce photos. All workers are also marketers -- some highly effective and some not at all. And there's a general intellect which has been developed, a kind of community expertise and teaching of this expertise to produce photographs which are good at producing the valuable, attractive likes and comments (i.e., photographs which are especially pretty and provocative), and a somewhat competitive culture to become a better marketer."

White said he hated the limitations society imposed when it came to relationships. “I’ve always felt it’s ridiculous to say, of any of the females in my life: You’re my friend, you’re my wife, you’re my girlfriend, you’re my co-worker,” he said. “This is your box, and you’re not allowed to stray outside of it.” I told him it sounded as if monogamy might not be for him, and he laughed. “You think?” he said. “I gave that up a long time ago. Those rules don’t apply anymore.”

"In the months since my biography of Jobs came out, countless commentators have tried to draw management lessons from it. Some of those readers have been insightful, but I think that many of them (especially those with no experience in entrepreneurship) fixate too much on the rough edges of his personality. The essence of Jobs, I think, is that his personality was integral to his way of doing business. He acted as if the normal rules didn’t apply to him, and the passion, intensity, and extreme emotionalism he brought to everyday life were things he also poured into the products he made. His petulance and impatience were part and parcel of his perfectionism."

"Kimo's high expectations set a new pace for me. He taught me “the standard pace is for chumps” - that the system is designed so anyone can keep up. If you're more driven than “just anyone” - you can do so much more than anyone expects. And this applies to ALL of life - not just school."

"If you started out building a dating site and instead ended up  building a video sharing site (YouTube) that handles 4 billion views a day, then it’s just possible you learned something along the way. And indeed, Mike Solomon, one of the original engineers at YouTube, did learn a lot and he has given a talk about it at PyCon: Scalability at YouTube."

Time is the most valuable asset you don’t own. You may or may not realize it yet, but how you use or don’t use your time is going to be the best indication of where your future is going to take you .

WSJ: When did you first sense that it might take off?

Mr. Ferdowsi: When we posted a three-minute video demo. We went from 5,000 users on our beta waiting list to over 75,000 in 24 hours. That was pretty surreal.

Reasonable people are often scared by the new. This is because reasonable people are not Barbarians and they are not hackers. They appreciate the predictable, profitable, and knowable world that comes with a well-defined process, and I would like to thank each and everyone of them because these people keep the trains running and on time. No one likes Barbarians because the Barbarian strategy is one at odds with civilization. By definition, a Barbarian, a hacker, is building on a strategy that is at odds with the majority.

It’s awesome.

Growth decisions provide you with:

new knowledge and skills
financial wealth
connections
valuable experience that you could not get in any other way
time and energy to do more things (or fewer things)
more control

The radical chef David Chang became an unlikely superstar making strange, cheap, and mesmerizing food at Momofuku Noodle Bar. But with his new project (Asian burritos!) off to a slow start, the willful iconoclast faces an unpalatable choice: stay culty and small or compromise and bring in the masses.

The Authors@Google program welcomed David Chang, chef and owner of Momofuku Noodle Bar, Ssam Bar, Ko, and Bakery & Milk Bar to Google's New York office to discuss his first book, "Momofuku".

Though most of our stack at Simple is based on open source software, we occasionally try commercial software. Mostly, we don’t end up buying it. A big reason why is the incredibly time-consuming, aggravating sales process that most commercial enterprise (that is, non-consumer) software vendors insist on. I’m between vendor calls today and channeling my irritation into this post.

Be a patient listener (it is this, not fast talking, that gets a con-man his coups).
Never look bored.
Wait for the other person to reveal any political opinions, then agree with them.
Let the other person reveal religious views, then have the same ones.
Hint at sex talk, but don’t follow it up unless the other fellow shows a strong interest.
Never discuss illness, unless some special concern is shown.
Never pry into a person’s personal circumstances (they’ll tell you all eventually).
Never boast. Just let your importance be quietly obvious.
Never be untidy.
Never get drunk.

Complexity is easy. It’s fun to come up with new ideas and it feels great to say yes to everything, to avoid making trade-offs.

It’s simplicity that’s hard. To make a great product, you have to define its core – a single challenge – and painfully, painstakingly eliminate creative features to stay true to the product and its purpose.

Much of rap is about business, whether the drug business, the music industry or work ethic, said Adam Bradley, an associate professor specializing in African-American literature at the University of Colorado at Boulder who wrote "Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop" and co-edited "The Anthology of Rap."

"It comes out of the fact that rap is such a direct mode of expression, maybe more so than any other music lyric, because of the emphasis on language, of words above melody or harmony," Mr. Bradley said.

People think of rap lyrics as being only about money, women, status and cocaine, he said, but more pervasive themes are leadership, collaboration and the vulnerability beneath the swagger -- all relevant in business.

An intense debate about business models, bubbles, capitalism, quality of life, market share vs. profit share, running a business vs. selling a business, and a variety of other related topics from episode 46 of This Week in Startups.

You have to ask yourself how you allow people to communicate what's in their lives," says Systrom. "I don't like the idea of Instagram as a photo sharing service, and I don't think it is," says Systrom, "it's very much a communication tool, it's a visual communications tool."

I’m appalled. A successful marketing guy asked me a question recently — a real no-brainer — which led me to believe he didn’t know the difference between strategy and tactics.

People sharing more — even if just with their close friends or families — creates a more open culture and leads to a better understanding of the lives and perspectives of others. We believe that this creates a greater number of stronger relationships between people, and that it helps people get exposed to a greater number of diverse perspectives.

The best stories about Mark Zuckerberg and his company.

Each participant gave us capsule descriptions of their own first principles (professional or personal, organizational or individual), and talked about how those principles have changed over time and about the place where they began. We invite you to carry on the conversation by posting the underlying principles of your own work in the discussion section below.

Each member of A$AP has a full-fledged personality and purpose within the group. Sure, a lot of them rap, as you know and expect, but you'll also find managers, stylists, producers, designers, and more role players branching out from the same collective.

Q. What ideals have you embraced from Steve Jobs?

A. The importance of doing everything you do to your very best. And that the journey is the reward. If you do things well one at a time, you end up in a really good place. Don't get ahead of yourself. Control the things you can.

Portland is an introspective city, no question about it. The people who come here come here for the space and time this city and landscape and region allows. It doesn't mean the city doesn't care about community. It does. Cities like New York and Los Angeles, people go there with the express intent to place their work in the public realm. "I want my work to be seen," they would say.

I know architects there spent their energy going to events, fundraisers, openings -- time spent just getting things out into the public realm.

In Oregon, you have the opportunity but you can take things in and sit with them. That act of introspection, then, allows you to reflect the world back in a different way. It's a different process.

When Barack Obama joined Silicon Valley’s top luminaries for dinner in California last February, each guest was asked to come with a question for the president.

But as Steven P. Jobs of Apple spoke, President Obama interrupted with an inquiry of his own: what would it take to make iPhones in the United States?

It turns out there is, and the key to the mystery is the old adage "a word to the wise is sufficient." Because this phrase is not only overused, but overused in an indirect way (by prepending the subject to some advice), most people who've heard it don't know what it means. What it means is that if someone is wise, all you have to do is say one word to them, and they'll understand immediately. You don't have to explain in detail; they'll chase down all the implications.

Even with the right tools, it's not obvious how to reach a robust audience for a topic. In this section, we share what we've learned during Project Argo, and what we recommend to anyone taking on a topical blogging project.

Stanley Kubrick believed that "filmmaking is an exercise in problem solving." He meant that to include the distribution and marketing of his films as well as their production, and he devoted more time and effort to managing the release of his films than any other director. In my view, it's one of the reasons he made only 13 films in 46 years. He relished the problem-solving.

I’ve written before about the importance of networking and moving from wallflower to evangelist. Kobayashi was adamant about the importance of this. “Closed mouths don’t get fed,” he would say. “If you want something, you have to either ask for it or walk up and take it.”

Clearly, YouTube would benefit from premium content, the kind of stuff you could watch on Netflix and Hulu. But the owners of that content were reluctant to license it to YouTube, either because they could make more money selling it elsewhere or because they didn’t trust YouTube/Google. Kamangar needed someone who would make content owners realize how valuable YouTube’s audience could be to them.

Martin says that the trouble began in 1976 when finance professor Michael Jensen and Dean William Meckling of the Simon School of Business at the University of Rochester published a seemingly innocuous paper in the Journal of Financial Economics entitled “Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs and Ownership Structure.” […]

The principal-agent problem occurs, the article argued, because agents have an inherent incentive to optimize activities and resources for themselves rather than for their principals. Ignoring Peter Drucker’s foundational insight of 1973 that the only valid purpose of a firm is to create a customer, Jensen and Meckling argued that the singular goal of a company should be to maximize the return to shareholders.

“If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you’re competing against a lot of people,” Mr. Bezos told reporter Steve Levy last month in an interview in Wired. “But if you’re willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you’re now competing against a fraction of those people, because very few companies are willing to do that. Just by lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavors that you could never otherwise pursue. At Amazon we like things to work in five to seven years. We’re willing to plant seeds, let them grow—and we’re very stubborn.”

The norm among professionals has been that if you are doing well at work, you have no personal life.
But Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg has found a simple rule that allows her to have a flourishing career and a happy family life. She and her husband (David Goldberg, CEO of SurveyMonkey) have split their responsibilities at the home equally and have prioritized both of their careers, not just hers.

Helps creative people and businesses run their own subscription programs.
Start and run ‘of-the-month’ clubs, quarterly art projects and more!

There are only so many grade A players. If you spread yourself out over too many things, none of them will be great.”

20 years ago, in January of 1991, a very critical 28-page internal memo — written by the then-head of Disney's film studios, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and distributed to his fellow executives in an effort to refocus their approach — was leaked to the press, and instantly became talk of the industry. The recent release of the big-budget Dick Tracy movie had been a disappointment and, as a result, Katzenberg was desperate to recapture the magic of old and rid his studio of their extremely costly "blockbuster mentality." This fascinating, highly quotable memo was his mission statement. Its subsequent circulation in Hollywood caused a huge stir.

Here’s that rare Steve Jobs story, one that’s never been told, about the company that got away. Jobs had been tracking a young software developer named Drew Houston, who blasted his way onto Apple’s radar screen when he reverse-engineered Apple’s file system so that his startup’s logo, an unfolding box, appeared elegantly tucked inside. Not even an Apple SWAT team had been able to do that.

Google+ is a knee-jerk reaction, a study in short-term thinking, predicated on the incorrect notion that Facebook is successful because they built a great product. But that's not why they are successful. Facebook is successful because they built an entire constellation of products by allowing other people to do the work. So Facebook is different for everyone. Some people spend all their time on Mafia Wars. Some spend all their time on Farmville. There are hundreds or maybe thousands of different high-quality time sinks available, so there's something there for everyone.