Number of words: 187 Energy problems are engineering problems, so you would expect to find nerds running cleantech companies. You’d be wrong: the ones that failed were run by shockingly nontechnical teams. These salesman-executives were good at raising capital and securing government subsidies, but they were less good at building products that customers wanted to … Read more
Number of words: 158 A product is viral if its core functionality encourages users to invite their friends to become users too. This is how Facebook and PayPal both grew quickly: every time someone shares with a friend or makes a payment, they naturally invite more and more people into the network. This isn’t just … Read more
Number of words: 187 In between personal sales (salespeople obviously required) and traditional advertising (no salespeople required) there is a dead zone. Suppose you create a software service that helps convenience store owners track their inventory and manage ordering. For a product priced around $1,000, there might be no good distribution channel to reach the … Read more
Number of words: 150 When assigning responsibilities to employees in a startup, you could start by treating it as a simple optimization problem to efficiently match talents with tasks. But even if you could somehow get this perfectly right, any given solution would quickly break down. Partly that’s because startups have to move fast, so … Read more
Number of words: 170 Bob Dylan has said that he who is not busy being born is busy dying. If he’s right, being born doesn’t happen at just one moment—you might even continue to do it somehow, poetically at least. The founding moment of a company, however, really does happen just once: only at the … Read more
Number of words: 171 For people to be fully committed, they should be properly compensated. Whenever an entrepreneur asks me to invest in his company, I ask him how much he intends to pay himself. A company does better the less it pays the CEO—that’s one of the single clearest patterns I’ve noticed from investing … Read more
Number of words – 3,442 Visit the average university campus and it is likely that the newest and most ostentatious building will be occupied by the business school. The business school has the best building because it makes the biggest profits (or, euphemistically, “contribution” or “surplus”) – as you might expect, from a form of … Read more
Number of words – 1,848 If power were a prescription drug, it would come with a long list of known side effects. It can intoxicate. It can corrupt. It can even make Henry Kissinger believe that he’s sexually magnetic. But can it cause brain damage? When various lawmakers lit into John Stumpf at a congressional … Read more
Number of words – 1,055 Hidden 1,000 metres under Mount Ikeno in Japan is a place that looks like a supervillain’s dream. Super-Kamiokande (or “Super-K” as it’s sometimes referred to) is a neutrino detector. Neutrinos are sub-atomic particles which travel through space and pass through solid matter as though it were air. Studying these particles … Read more
Number of words – 81 The Best Buy CEO applied what he calls the bicycle theory to the moribund company. “If you try to direct a bicycle at standstill, you fall. The key is to get moving,” Joly says. “You learn about creating energy.” Initially, he says, he wasn’t much more clear about his plans … Read more
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