But alas, the 48,342 people that visited my site resulted in an additional 23 e-comics sales compared to the previous day. So about 0.048% of the extra visitors made a purchase.

cf horowitz's "mbas are underpriced"
Indeed, the vibe, in the words of a former employee, is of an Apple that is becoming "far more traditional," meaning more MBAs, more process, and more structure. (In point of fact, 2,153 Apple employees reference the term "MBA" in their LinkedIn profiles out of a nonretail workforce of nearly 28,000. More than half the employees who reference "MBA" have been at Apple less than two years.)

Peter Thiel: An online pet food company is the paradigm example.

Marc Andreessen: And that’s not such a bad idea anymore! Diapers.com was bought by Amazon for $450m. Golfballs.com turns out to be a pretty good business. Even Webvan is coming back! The grocery delivery company failed miserably back in the ‘90s. But now, city by city, it’s back, trying to figure out crowdsourced delivery. The market is so much bigger now. There were about 50 million people online in the ‘90s. Today it’s more like 2.5 billion. People have gotten acclimated to e-commerce. The default assumption is that everything is available online now.



...


Marc Andreessen: I interned at IBM in 1991. It was extremely screwed up. Those of you who follow IBM history will know it as the John Akers era. I was pretty much given the codex of how to screw up a company. You learn everything at a dysfunctional company. It was fascinating. Once I got to to see the org chart. There were 400,000 employees. I was 14 levels below the CEO. Which meant that my boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss was still 7 levels below the CEO.

The skill that you learn at IBM is how to exist at IBM. It’s completely self-referential. It’s the terminal state. People don’t leave.

Publishers say that a carefully released short story, timed six to eight weeks before a big hardcover comes out, can entice new readers who might be willing to pay 99 cents for a story but reluctant to spend $14 for a new e-book or $26 for a hardcover.

Airport bookstores these days can feature not just one stack of James Patterson books, but an entire rack of them, sometimes more than six titles at a time. Mr. Patterson produced 12 books last year, aided on some titles by co-writers. He will publish 13 this year.

Authors don’t seem to be writing digital-only short stories for the money. Advances are typically not part of the bargain, and the works are priced so low (usually $0.99 or $1.99) that they don’t produce much revenue, even if they take several weeks or months to write.

But some authors said that even though they are beginning to accept them as one of the necessary requirements of book marketing, they still find them taxing to produce.

“I have been known to be a little grumpy on the subject sometimes,” said Steve Berry, a popular thriller writer who writes short stories that are released between books. “It does sap away some of your energy. You don’t ever want to get into a situation where your worth is being judged by the amount of your productivity.”

Yangzijiang = Chinese shipbuilder. $3.7bn Singapore listed. They sell new ships for prices not much beyond distressed resale value of 2nd hand vessels. $1.7bn on their balance sheet is loans to various SMEs unable to access funds from banks, who pay interest rates 10-20% in size. "Of course, Yangzijiang's executives exude business elan and I am sure their intentoins are honourable. They certainly say all the right things. For instance, they insist on borrowers having at least three times the value of the loans in collateral, and will accept only land and Chinese A-shares. In reality, of course, they represent a team of shipyard managers building new ships at a price barely above that of second hand ships and lending hand-over-fist during an unprecedented credit boom using a plethora of financial techniques from rural micro finance to venture capital. This $1.7bn loan book is about 80% of the group's NAV. That is not something you want to be invested in."

For thirty years, Kodak housed under its Rochester headquarters a research reactor equipped with over three pounds of enriched uranium. Kept secret, the uranium was removed in 2007, Democrat and Chronicle reports.

Though the reactor and its surrounding lab’s existence are perplexing and still a bit disconcerting, the idea behind the operation was fairly solid: Kodak used the uranium and reactor to test chemicals for impurities, as well as run neutron radiography tests. How that research was applied to its actual core operations isn’t clear, however.

And that’s the real indie e-publishing story. It might not make the headlines that the big deals will, but it’s the number of working writers making a living from their writing, not the number of millionaires, that is the genuine revolution in e-publishing.

crowdsourced directory of product supply chains and carbon footprints

You have to make honest feedback a positive experience. It was almost like that red was a gem. We had found an issue that needed special attention. I had to demonstrate with my behavior that I welcomed it: “That’s great visibility. Thank you for sharing. What can we do to help you out?” I’ve been in environments where it’s not as safe to share. You can’t improve if you don’t know what the real situation is. Finally, you’ve got to act on it. If you get honest feedback and do nothing about it, then the feedback will stop.

Possibly the most important technique I've observed over the years is the executive session at the end of the meeting. This is when the Board meets without the CEO and team in the room and has a discussion of the meeting and what the key takeaways are. The executive session can be five minutes or it can be a half hour. Sometimes there is very little to discuss in executive session. Sometimes there is a lot. After the executive session ends, the CEO should either be invited back to have a debrief on the executive session or the Chairman of the Board should meet with the CEO to debrief on the executive session. This is an opportunity for the Board to provide feedback to the CEO on the business, the team, and performance, and the strategy. Boards should not miss this opportunity to provide feedback and CEOs should demand it of them

My first company, Pure Software, was exciting and innovative in the first few years and bureaucratic and painful in the last few before it got acquired. The problem was we tried to systemize everything and set up perfect procedures. We thought that was a good thing, but it killed freedom and responsibility. After the company was acquired, I reflected on what went wrong.

One correspondent in the Sydney Gazette told how he had seen a man carrying a cloth-wrapped bundle under his arm up George St, and asked to see it.

"With perfect indifference as to my feelings and consternation, the man replied it was the head of a New Zealander, which he had purchased from a person lately arrived from that country and that he was going to dispose of it for two guineas to a gentleman who was about to embark for England."

It was a cruel example of supply and demand in a free market.

As Maori discovered they could sell the sacrosanct heads of their enemies for muskets, some - especially among Ngati Toa, Ngapuhi and the tribes of the Far North - put aside their scruples and began producing more heads.

As first they boosted supply by manufacturing excuses to go to war and capture more enemy chiefs; then they began roughly tattooing their slaves, waiting for the scars to heal, beheading them and selling them.

But they created a market glut and prices plummeted.

PR is the art of getting trusted, objective third parties to give you press.

reminds me of Tim O'Reilly: values-based business.

And in the end, the secret to YKK’s success is equally uncomplicated but equally impressive: YKK makes incredibly dependable zippers, ships them on time without fail, offers a wide range of colors, materials, and styles, and never gets badly undercut on price. The feeling in the apparel industry is that you can’t go wrong with YKK.


32c for a typical 14-inch "invisible" zipper as you'd find in a sweater. Manufacturers figure it's not worth trying to save pennies when a defective zip ruins the user experience.

research shows microfinance helps entrepreneurship, but doesn't effectively reduce poverty on any large scale

seductive stories about business, sans data

Investors are trying to find the exceptional outcomes, so they are looking for something exceptional about the company. Instead of trying to do everything well (traction, team, product, social proof, pitch, etc), do one thing exceptional. As a startup you have to be exceptional in at least one regard.” -Naval Ravikant @naval

“Forgers tend to be embittered souls,” says Edward Dolnick, author of a book about Van Meegeren. “Typically, they start out as artists and nobody likes their stuff but they get appreciated when they put someone else’s name on it. That feels like proof that the art world is phony

In Gore’s self-regulating system, all the normal management rules are reversed. In this back-to-front world, leaders aren’t appointed: they emerge when they accumulate enough followers to qualify as such. So when the previous group CEO retired three years ago, there was no shortlist of preferred candidates. Alongside board discussions, a wide range of associates were invited to nominate to the post someone they would be willing to follow. ‘We weren’t given a list of names – we were free to choose anyone in the company,’ Kelly says. ‘To my surprise, it was me.’

Similarly, Gore doesn’t have budgets in the sense that most companies do. ‘When I joined we didn’t have a planning process – budgeting wasn’t in the vocabulary,’ she says. Gore now does a better job of planning investment and forecasting, she maintains, but it still tries to avoid the games-playing and inflexibility of the traditional budget. ‘Budgets hinder associates from reacting in real time to changing circumstances,’ she says. Most of Gore’s investment will only have an impact years ahead: ‘We don’t want folks making short-term decisions that are not in the best interest of the long term. The planning and investment horizons have to match.’

Gore also seems to reverse the usual notions of economies of scale. When Gore units grow to around 200 people, they are usually split up. These small plants are organized in clusters or campuses, ideally with a dozen or so sites in close enough proximity to permit knowledge synergies, but still intimate and separate enough to encourage ownership and identity. An accountant might complain that creates duplication of costs; Gore believes those are more than offset by the benefits smallness brings.

data and inconclusive analysis about whether companies are finding it harder to get A rounds these days

"anything that is not core is context. "

dodgy transcription of a talk by Geoffrey Moore about getting the important shit done first

a one-star increase in Yelp rating leads to a 5-9 percent increase in revenue

really good detailed article about the new robber barons of industry: tech giants and their heated battle for whatever

serendipity days like hack days
NPR

shows %ges for founders, staff, etc.

For us, the ideal team layout has been two developers and one business owner. One developer is not enough over the long term (they need a second pair of eyes on the code, and besides, one is a lonely number). Three developers works fine as well. Get to four or five and things start to become a bit crowded; there may not be enough surface area for them to all work without stepping on each others’ toes constantly. Almost all of Heroku’s teams have two developers.

“Business owner” is a somewhat clumsy term, but it’s the best we’ve come to describe the person doing some combination of product management, project management, and general management for the team.

Good ideas are like Nike sports shoes. They may facilitate success for an athlete who possesses them, but on their own they are nothing but an overpriced pair of sneakers. Sports shoes don’t win races. Athletes do.

nodes and lines

Demography makes it harder for people who start at the bottom of the ladder to climb up it. And that has political consequences.

It's ugly watching this sausage being made

"Location was an issue in two different ways. The first being that there has to be congruence between your startup’s concept and location. By way of crude example, if your building innovative trading software for Wall Street, be where you customers are and where you can best network. Location also played a role in failure for remote teams. The key being that if your team is working remotely, make sure you find effective communication methods; else lack of teamwork and planning could lead to failure."

ballpark valuations for signing bonus, team buy, tech buy, business asset, strategic asset.

when and why you sell for different reasons

. In 2007, comScore, Starcom and Tacoda found that heavy clickers represented 6 percent of U.S. Internet users, moderate clickers accounted for 10 percent and light clickers accounted for 16 percent. By March 2009, those numbers had dropped substantially in each case, to 4 percent of Internet users for heavy clickers, 4 percent for moderate clickers and 8 percent for light clickers.

astonishing article, brilliant. horrifying: cartel controlling diamonds, manufacturing desire for them. diamonds have bugger all resale value.

Although O’Neal didn’t realize it, this was not the way to compete with Goldman. Goldman’s management-committee members all participated in discussions of the various businesses. O’Neal, by contrast, insisted that the company’s executives speak only to him about their businesses and not with one another. The Goldman brass insisted on knowing bad news; Merrill executives trembled at the thought of giving O’Neal bad news. Whenever Goldman’s C.E.O. had to make an important decision, he consulted with a handful of advisers. O’Neal rarely asked for input when making a decision. And under no circumstances did he want to be challenged once he had made up his mind.

Heilmeier's Catechism

A set of questions credited to Heilmeier that anyone proposing a research project or product development effort should be able to answer.[1]
What are you trying to do? Articulate your objectives using absolutely no jargon.
How is it done today, and what are the limits of current practice?
What's new in your approach and why do you think it will be successful?
Who cares?
If you're successful, what difference will it make?
What are the risks and the payoffs?
How much will it cost?
How long will it take?
What are the midterm and final "exams" to check for success?

game to improve your attitude towards being rejected

Marketers typically pay $20 to $40 per thousand viewers for a prime-time ad. On Hulu, which began offering shows to the public in March 2008, an ad on the animated series “The Simpsons” costs $60 per thousand viewers

"Have data cause interrupts. We have to invent process mechanisms that force decision makers to regularly confront the results of their decisions. This has to happen with regularity, and without too much time elapsing, or else we might forget what decisions we made."