...

2009? - Aaron Patzer describing his path
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGhedOHLTOI

2009.07.23 - Fortune Brainstorm TECH - Panel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_h5ZX9GPIk

2010.02.18 - VentureBeat - 4min interview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hENM1T-SaX8

2010.05(?) - The Duke Start-Up Challenge
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNT5nmqmk3A&t=7m20s

2010.07.29 - The American Entrepreneur
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQRlHWIa8l8

2010.12 - Net@Night - Interview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wixHKoXGJsQ&t=26m23s

2010.12.08 - Founder Institute in Silicon Valley - Naming & Branding for Startups
http://vimeo.com/17670720
- Choose an English name. He gives an example of his competitor "wasabe", which he couldn't find online even after searching for it for an hour.
- Choose a meaningful name (mint relates to finance but it also has a connotation of freshness)
- Choose an original name (he gives the example of copy-cat companies that ended in "-ster" after friendster became successful)
- Choose a name that is spelled unambiguously. (examples of bad names: "milo", "flickr", "kwiqapps", "simplyhired" [the ending 'd' can be hard to hear])
06:41 - He bought "mymint.com" for $3,000.
08:00 - He offered the hedge fund guy $75,000 cash and was turned down.
8:25 - The key is that the domain has to be lightly-used.
~9:00 - He said three things got the guy convinced: 1) the opportunity for an asymmetric return (ie he got equity), 2) limited chance for loss (ie preferred stock), 3) a promise to not allow any other NY financiers to invest, so the manager could brag to his Wall St friends that he was getting to invest alongside the best VCs in Silicon Valley and none of them could get in.
10:00 - He got the domain for the equivalent of $182,000 in equity in the round of financing he was in the middle of negotiating. The guy liked the business so much that in the next round he ended up putting in $300,000. So they got the domain and $300,000. The guy ended up making $2.5 million from that investment (so from $500k to $3mill?)
10:25 - Lesson: Don't settle for a subpar name. Pick the right name and go after it with everything you've got.
10:45 - 90%+ of all brand marketing people are fluff. The people who do SEO are charlatans. Some people who do some types of direct marketing (SEM) are OK. "Brand marketing is where you can get away with the most fluff."
11:27 - Brand marketers use a lot of jargon that's impossible to understand.
11:30 - "There is a logical way to figure out what the value proposition of your business should be and how you should be positioned against your competitors." He suggests you create a matrix (eg a 2x2 matrix) where you plot the most important features of a product (eg "# of things it can do" and "cost") and then plot where the competition is on that matrix. Then just look for gaps.
16:40 - Very interesting: he describes how they went to the Mountain View metro station and tested their slogan on them to see what their perceptions were. Go anywhere there's a queue.
~18:00 - He went back to IN and tested his explanation of his product on his parents' 60yo friends.
19:00 - In surveys people generally say they'll use it more than they actually do.

2011 - Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco - 5 min interview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWctrFsydNo

2011? - the Founder Conference
http://vimeo.com/15644909

...

• 2014.04.30 - Founder Institute
• 2013.10.01 - Trep Life - From Finance to Fountain: Mint Founder Aaron Patzer's New Move Is Making Expertise Accessible

Alibaba / Jack Ma

• https://vulcanpost.com/255811/jack-ma-life-20-60-years-old/
  • Very interesting advice!

Andrew Carnegie

Books

The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie

Chronology of Success

1. Born to a poor family in Scotland. They had to leave their village when machine-looms made the father's hand-looms obsolete; they ended up settling down in Pittsburgh. Carnegie received almost no formal education.

Basically, he was in the railroad industry for ~15 years (the same amount of time that Walton was in retail before starting Wal-Mart) from the age of 17, worked harder than anyone around him, got promoted again and again until he was in a fairly prominent position, and only THEN started the project that really seemed to start to make him rich: a bridge-building partnership with some contacts he had made.

He was able to use his many years of experience in the railroad industry to make intelligent decisions about the direction of the business (e.g. concluding that the business was a profitable venture, choosing the best men in the industry for his partners, using non-obvious information to convince customers that his bridges were superior to that of the competition).

He was also able to see steel coming like a wave of the future (like a surfer), and he did a great job of launching himself onto it as it arrived. As part of the bridge-building business he'd bought a small iron-forging plant, and knew a lot about iron and steel because of their importance in building bridges and acting as train tracks (apparently iron train tracks used to break ALL THE TIME back then and would cause all kinds of train accidents; pretty crazy to think about).



The last 100 pages or so of this book seem pretty boring; just him talking about his philanthropy, all the friends he's honored by naming a building after them, etc. (everything starting with the chapter "The Gospel of Wealth")

Lessons

1. Keep your eye out for people with Carnegie's traits: disciplined, hard-working, thoughtful, etc. [I didn't get a strong sense of whether his ambition would have been visible earlier in his career.]

2. You can invest your time in PEOPLE just as you can invest your time in founding a company; Carnegie rose through the ranks because the guy he was working for kept getting promoted and always brought Carnegie along with him. This is the exact same kind of relationship that Generals Sherman and Grant had in the Civil War; Sherman had the opportunity to compete with Grant for control of the entire army but chose instead to forcefully decline any such ambition, instead loudly declaring his intention to work faithfully under Grant. Then as Grant got promoted he brought Sherman along with him, which ended up putting Sherman in the position to conduct affairs as he pleased (which led him to absolutely destroy the South).
- Working together and developing a friendship can propel both of you to higher ground than if you're competing against each other for the "higher" rank (and generating animosity between yourselves as a result). This actually kind of ties into my thought that "leaders" aren't necessarily any more worthy of praise and attention than the people "under" them.
- You might be better off looking for someone who is in a position to rise up but hasn't yet. I'll have to think about this more.


Q: What exact expertise did Carnegie acquire in his first 15 years that made him successful at future projects? Would there have been any way to acquire that expertise more quickly?

Notable Quotes

•  "The battle of life is already half won by the young man who is brought in contact with high officials; and the great aim of every boy should be to do something beyond the sphere of his duties- something which attracts the attention of those over him."

...

• I've noticed I get a lot of comments about my blue sunglasses.

Benjamin Franklin

Books

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

a great book. it's concise, conversational, funny, filled with valuable lessons and great stories. i actually got the feeling that we could be good friends (i.e. it seemed to me that our values are close enough and that we'd see eye-to-eye on a lot of things). the whole thing was written as a letter (or letters) to his son, which is why it's a lot less dry than other autobiographies you'll see (where the author is clearly being careful to avoid making himself look bad).

highlights:

- franklin's attempt at correcting all of his faults
- his weekly meetings to discuss intellectual subjects
- his work ethic (working from dawn till dusk, seven days a week while establishing his printing shop)
- his chronology of success: made his way from Boston to Philly without much money, ended up working as an assistant to a printer, eventually opened his own printing shop and worked his tail off to do a good job of it, gradually gained more customers and Philadelphia became a bigger city (when franklin got there there wasn't much competition), he also became well-known for his published thoughts on things (iirc). don't quite remember how he got pulled into the revolution; i think it's just because he was already well-known by then.

Box / Aaron Levie

2014.10.30 - Stanford / YCombinator - How to Start a Startup - Lecture 12 - Building for the Enterprise
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFVDjrvQJdw
He comes off very well IMO, he seems to know his stuff.
02:10 - When they started they didn't know they wanted to do enterprise software.
04:15 - They got the idea in 2004, started in 2005.
05:30 - They noticed in college that it was really hard to share files.
05:40 - He had an internship that involved copying lots of paper.
06:45 - The first name was Box.net
06:50 - They noticed the cost of storage was dropping dramatically.
07:15 - They had more powerful browsers & internet connections.
07:25 - People had more locations they wanted to share files from.
07:40 - Look for broad changes that are happening.
08:10 - They put together a quick version of Box. They got funding from Mark Cuban before Shark Tank.
09:25 - They first moved to Berkeley, and then Palo Alto
09:35 - They had hundreds of thousands people signing up every month. (2006) They offered a free GB.
10:00 - They ran into a problem where they were over-serving consumers and under-serving businesses. They had more functionality than consumers wanted and less functionality than businesses wanted.
11:35 - They thought consumer would be really fun and enterprise would be really hard.
11:50 - The big problem in the consumer world is how to make money. You generally have two options: 1) have the user pay for the product, or 2) use advertising. In today's world the annual consumer spend on mobile apps is $35 billion and the total worldwide ad spend is $135 billion, so the consumer world has about $170 billion in money to go after. However, in enterprise, $3.5 trillion is spent on IT services every year.
13:20 - At the time there were rumors that Google would be coming out with a free version.
14:35 - It can take a couple YEARS to sell a product to a company, and then a few more years for them to implement it.
15:10 - When looking at enterprise software you often ask why the GUI is so bad.
15:30 - Another problem with enterprise is that you'll have to hire salespeople.
16:40 - Every investor in 2007 was telling them they wouldn't make it in enterprise.
17:08 - The
18:50 - They got lucky in that they had an investor who was also early in his own career and was willing to take the chance.
19:10 - They architected the product to work in one particular version of the world, and they happened to be right.
19:50 - Main topic: What has changed that has made enterprise easier to enter than before?
20:30 - He talks about "on-premise computing" but I didn't really understand.
21:45 - The big change is that CIOs are now taking advantage of cloud services. From their perspective, there are decades of investment that need to be shifted to the cloud.
23:20 - The reachable enterprise market has gotten way bigger.
24:20 - He distinguishes user-led vs IT-led purchasing decisions. Which makes me think Box is just getting used by individuals.
30:10 - Go to any business and ask what are the fundamental changes in (?) and ask what software will be necessary to power that.
31:50 - He starts to give advice about how to get started. He gives a really good caveat that things are messy.
32:30 - #1. Spot technology disruptions. Gaps between how things HAVE been done and how they CAN be done.
33:50 - Go to articles in the '90s and you'll see that all we're doing nowadays is trying things that have already been tried 10, 20, 30 years ago, but the time wasn't right.
35:00 - He gives an example of how the founders of PlanGrid realized that $4 billion are spent printing blueprints, but with the iPad all that could be done away with.
36:10 - #2. Start intentionally small. "If people call it a 'toy' you're definitely onto something." Start on a sliver of a problem and make the user experience totally amazing.
37:28 - Example: zenpayroll - They found that the payroll process was a pain. The sliver they went after for startups was just payroll. The incumbents look at something like zenpayroll and think, "Oh, that's small, we don't have to worry about it."
39:00 - #3. Look for things that incumbents can't do because it's economically and/or technically infeasible.
41:20 - #4. Look for businesses at the bleeding edge of technology to be your earliest customers.
43:20 - #5. Listen to your customers. Build what they need, which may not be what they ask for.
43:55 - #6. Modularize, not customize.
44:15 - #7. Focus on the user. It's easier to sell into an organization.
44:40 - #8. Your product should sell itself. But you still need salesmen.
45:30 - Read these three books:
- Crossing the Chasm
- The Innovator's Dilemma
- Behind the Cloud


2015.01.28 - Inc. Magazine - A Look Back on How Box's Aaron Levie Became Entrepreneur of the Year, 2013
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGjj45CgRwI
01:37 - He gives some interesting comments about what it's like at the beginning: "On day one everything about your day and your time and every moment you have is about building a product and getting it in the hands of customers. You're not focused on hiring, you're not focused on selling, you're not focused on scaling, you're just focused on, "I need to build a product and I need to get it in the hands of customers." And there's something very genuine and raw about that process, because you have to be able to create that product-market fit, and that's one of the hardest grinds there is, is that early stage."
06:47 - There's a couple of clips of him interacting with random employees at Box and it's clear he doesn't have any particular connection with them. It comes off as the kind of "blow sunshine up their asses" behavior Ben Horowitz describes in his book. I think he was probably just put under pressure by the film crew to do it.
08:41 - He gives a BS spiel about how he didn't start the company as a way of making money.
09:50 - "The best piece of advice I've ever gotten as an entrepreneur was from Mark Cuban, who said "Don't hedge your bets." That was a lesson very early on that we learned from him, which was, you can't ever balance two completely contradictory things as a means of hedging. You have to decide, "What are you going to believe in?" and put all of your energy behind that. And those are the kinds of strategic decisions and trade-offs that you make every day as an entrepreneur, and it's important that you create the level of clarity and conviction to go after an opportunity that isn't hedging lots of different ideas or lots of different approaches, because that's the surest way that you'll never be good at anything."

Bryton S.

• 2016.11.09 - Q&A Session

  • Coding he did before he started a company:
    - He took CS classes in college.
    -- For example, algorithms classes.
    -- These didn't really prepare him for web development.
    - He was doing a lot of coding for the trading.

    Regarding the tech:
    - He created the spreadsheet library from scratch.
    -- Reason: He wanted to be able to approve changes as they happened and update data programmatically, and a lot of the software packages out there weren't very easy to use.
    -- He uses Ember.js
    - Web development is less about solving tricky problems and more about putting in the hours to get it done; you can have a rough idea of how long something will take to do.

    Getting the first version done:
    - He started coding in April.
    - Some days wake up at 10am, code for 12 hours on his mattress.
    - He can do ~1000 lines in those 12 hours.
    - He's pretty interested in the problem itself, and he likes the language; if not for that, he couldn't have worked as hard as he has.
    - He's started a LOT of projects that he never finished because he didn't find the problem interesting.
    - Having an actual customer to work with for the initial development was a helpful motivator.
    - "I can't imagine coding from home all day"
    - Finished coding it in four months.

    Getting his first customer:
    - His first customer was a friend of a friend: an eCommerce company had an office and they gave him a desk in exchange for the software.
    - It was almost not a good thing because he built it too close to what they wanted.
    - This company had too many desks and his friend was renting one of them. It was a month or two into development and he had a rough prototype.
    - This was a 5 person company who had gotten a pretty big office with 30 desks. (NW: It being a 5 person company may have made the decision-maker/CEO more accessible.)
    - He sent info about the program to the Princeton listserv, some guys were interested, his company was in San Diego, so B went to his office and showed him a presentation. 1.5 hours later he got an email saying they were interested.
    - He thinks it was crucial to meet people in person to close the deal.

    Regarding pricing:
    - He just asked the first customer before the presentation, "How much would you pay for this?" The guy answerd, "$3-5k/yr". And so in his presentation he said it would cost $5k/yr.
    - He read an article that says you should ask 3 questions: 1) What would you pay? (that's your lower limit) 2) What would be expensive? (that's prob. what you should charge) 3) What would be obscenely expensive? (that's your upper limit)

    Getting later customers:
    - 80-90% of business are referrals; his impression is that "no one does email" because you need to send 18 emails to get a meeting.
    - Self-service is hard because you're reliant on a lot of sign-ups / inbound marketing, which is really hard. It's hard to get people to organically visit your site.
    - [NW: I brought up the fact that Infer can't really do self-service trials for their original product because there's a costly setup process, and asked whether he had the same issue.] There is a configuration process that takes time; right now it's set up as self-service but he doesn't think that's a great model.
    - Self-service gets you basic editing but no one wants basic editing. The product is a lot more useful to customers if they can use the more-advanced features (eg workflows).
    - For example, a customer will have a list of orders and they want to select orders and press a button and the button knows to set the flag, or they have a db and want to expose it to customers so the customers can edit the db, but they don't want to build something complicated.
    - One problem he's seeing is that the tool is so general that he'll describe how one customer is using it and that use-case won't really apply to the prospective customer he's talking to.
    - He's finding that it's hard to describe it in an email.
    - He had five sales calls this week and had trouble finding a use case.
    - The first customer was really excited and introduced B to five other guys with the same problem.
    - He's also been trying to email Princeton 
    - Cold email and inbound marketing weren't very succesful.
    - He set up adwords last night, so it's yet to be seen how that'll work.
    - He posted the article on twitter, facebook, linkedin, custom accounts for that company. he also shared it on his personal social media acounts. He only got seven views.
    - He was so worried about the launch getting too much traffic, but no one showed up.
    - The problem with getting lots of traffic before you're ready is that it can really hurt you if you haven't worked out the kinks yet.
    - He's finding that customers will want some features that he doesn't have, so he needs to spend time coding them.

    How he's spending his time now that he's switched to selling:
    - Now he's mostly doing business stuff, maybe 3 hours of coding if he can find the time.
    - What "business stuff" means: Updating the deck, coming up with strategy, coming up with leads, updating the website, mainly thinking about the business model, thinking about features, thinking about how he wants to approach sales.
    - Today he had four or five meetings: people he's getting advice from, or customers, or investors.
    - I asked a tangent Q regarding the investors: He's not ready to raise a round because he doesn't have customers. If he holds out for another two months he can get a bunch more customers and prove out the product and get a better valuation.
    - He also consults two days a week.
    - He works seven days a week, but he travels sometimes, or if a friend wants to do something, but otherwise he doesn't have any downtime. If he's not with friends he's working.
    - He used to work until 1 or 2am, which wasn't very good, because you get tired. He sets alarm for 8am or 9am but he's not too strict about it. The coworking space closes at 12am and he uses that to force himself to stop for the night. The most important thing is to not burn out.
    - He's not afraid to take a break if he's not feeling it (typically this is if he went out drinking the previous day).
    - How to keep your eye on the big picture: He structures his day in terms of time. "Today I'm going to work from 12 to 4, and however much I get done between 12 and 4 is what I'll do." versus "I'm trying to get XYZ done today and I'll spend however long it takes to get that done.". That's better than focusing on particular features you want to get done. The focus isn't on finishing the task; it's on maximizing the progress per unit of time.

Chris Sacca

...

david_gobaud_resume.pdf

Drew Houston of DropBox

...

 

Drew Houston's HN comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dhouston

2011.10.18 - Forbes - Dropbox: The Inside Story Of Tech's Hottest Startup

The next day he shot a missive to his staff: “We have one of the fastest-growing companies in the world,” it began. Then it featured a list of one-time meteors that fell to Earth: MySpace, Netscape, Palm, Yahoo YHOO -3.45%. 

• And now in 2015 there are articles talking about Dropbox falling to Earth...

• 2012.10.19 - Drew Houston, Dropbox: Keys to Success
  
  2:30 - naming
  - the domain 'dropbox.com' was taken when they started the company
  
  3:20 - When did you know you'd hit it big?
  - Getting positive feedback from friends.
  - Putting up a video of how it works and getting positive feedback.

2015.08.21 - Wired - Slack Is Overrun With Bots. Friendly, Wonderful Bots

...

• This is a very well-written article.

A startup’s greatest fear initially isn’t competition from others – it’s simply the worry of being ignored and irrelevant. Past a certain stage of growth, and now you’re worried about your competitors – what if they can built it better, cheaper, faster, stronger? At yet another point, though (I’d argue around the $1B valuation mark) your peers aren’t your biggest concern anymore. If you’re worth a billion dollars, you’re probably doing enough things well that your direct competitors can’t take you to the cleaners overnight. Instead, your nightmares shift to a fate even scarier than being outcompeted: being eclipsed. Specifically,being eclipsed by someone at one level of the stack above or below you.

What does this look like in practice? It’s what Microsoft did to the PC manufacturers, and then what the web browser did to Microsoft. It’s what Android/iOS did to the handset makers, and what Facebook is trying to do to them in turn. To those being eclipsed, it’s terrifying because the change happens so gradually and then so suddenly: Compaq was one of the best PC makers around until all of a sudden Windows was what mattered, not the machine it ran on. Then a bit later on, Windows ruled the world and Microsoft was King- but all the interesting stuff started happening inside the web browser. My point being: Compaq didn’t get creamed because somebody else came along and made a better desktop PC. They lost because all of a sudden Windows was what was important- and other PC Manufacturers like Dell were better suited to thrive in the new reality of modular commodity.

  

I preface my unicorn prediction with all of this to emphasize once again – when billion dollar tech companies die, it usually isn’t at the hands of their direct competitors. It’s simply because they go from one day being the best at what they do, to the next day being still the best at what they do except it doesn’t matter. When these companies are really big – i.e. in the $10B+ Decacorn range – it matters.

...

Enterprise Rent-A-Car

Books

Life Under the Corporate Microscope

This is an account of the rise of Enterprise Rent-a-Car by a guy who started there very early and ended up in some very high position for a bit (he's now a millionaire); the founder of Enterprise is now a billionaire, but I don't think there are any (auto)biographies of him out at the moment.

Ev Williams of Twitter, Blogger

...

Haagen-Dazs / Reuben and Rose Mattus

The Emperor of Ice Cream by Rose Mattus

Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Emperor-Ice-C ... 0974885703

I absolutely love Haagen Dazs; it's one of my favorite products, and seemed to anticipate the now-huge market for premium/natural ingredients (that's the basis for Whole Foods, for example). This was written by the wife and cofounder; it's a good book that seems to have mostly flown under the radar of the business world: the amazon page only has 1 review, and I'd never heard it mentioned before in any lists of business books. To be honest it isn't as engaging as some of the other autobiographies I've read (I can't quite put my finger on why), but it does have a lot of good information in it. I actually have an autographed copy which the recipient apparently never read (because the book was in like-new condition when I got it).

Thoughts from the book:
- they struggled very hard to compete against the huge ice cream makers; eventually they were able to be successful by going into a niche market that the big guys weren't paying attention to. It's a lot like a small animal deciding that it's not worth going after the same patch of food as a much bigger animal, and instead looking around for a patch that no big animal has seen yet. In Haagen Dazs' case, they went after the premium niche: extremely high quality ice cream that would be sold for a higher price.
- two big things that separates Haagen Dazs from other ice creams are 1) the addition of eggs, and 2) a much lower proportion of air-to-ice-cream. I didn't know this before, but apparently most ice creams are about 50% air (by volume). Just by accident, one day Reuben Mattus discovered that ice cream tasted way better with a lower amount of air. Now HD has about 20% (according to Rose).
- it seems that the Mattus family had a harder struggle to success than the Waltons. I want to spend some time thinking about what separated the two families' stories.
. . . One thing is that the Waltons were borrowing HEAVILY for many, many years to expand quickly. Sam Walton talks about borrowing from one bank to pay back another. The Mattus family also borrowed, but it doesn't seem they borrowed to the same extent as the Waltons. The Mattus family also seemed to borrow for risky ventures, like a never-before-done business idea (e.g. ice cream vending machines in the subways), rather than for an expansion of a proven idea (e.g. the Waltons borrowed to open new stores, which they KNEW from experience that people would prefer to whatever else was in town). The Mattus family had to give up the vending machine idea when 1) a kid tried to steal some ice cream and got his hand caught, resulting in a lawsuit, and 2) they discovered that they didn't have a way of repairing the machines. I guess the underlying lesson here would be, "To grow quickly, borrow money to bring your proven product to new people. It may be slower-going if you try to further-cultivate your existing base of customers through new ideas."
. . . Another thing is that Sam Walton aggressively sought out all existing good ideas in his industry from the very beginning; he came across one of the major ideas of his business, discounting, relatively early on. Walton said in his autobiography, "Most everything I've done I've copied from someone else" (or something like that). Reuben Mattus, on the other hand, seemed to rely more on himself for inspiration; it wasn't until well into his career that he came across the ideas that finally made his business take off (adding eggs and lowering the air content). He didn't come up with the ideas himself, though: one was an accident and the other was an idea he got from French ice cream makers. He may have benefited from following a path more like Walton's, aggressively seeking out every bit of information that existed all over the world about making ice cream and related products (from which he could get ideas).

Henry Ford / Ford Motor Company

My Life and Work by Henry Ford

I love this book. His prose isn't as easy to read as it could be, but the stuff he talks about are all top-top-top ideas. This is a book I'll need to re-read to catch all the ideas I missed the first time.

Lessons to be drawn from the book:

1. A good idea is not even close to being sufficient to be successful. Execution of the idea is extremely important. (Felix Dennis says the same thing)
2. Constantly experiment with new ideas. Don't judge one way or the other until you've examined the idea thoroughly.
3. Try to reduce risk ahead of bad events by coming up with a "Plan B" for everything you depend on.

Notable Quotes:

"Almost anyone can think up an idea. The thing that counts is developing it into a practical product." (Intro, p3)

"When [people] talk about improvements usually [they] have in mind some change in a product. An "improved" product is one that has been changed. That is not my idea. I do not believe in starting to make until I have discovered the best possible thing." (Intro, p13)

"We are constantly experimenting with new ideas...I do not believe in letting any good idea get by me, but I will not quickly decide whether an idea is good or bad. If an idea seems good or seems even to have possibilities, I believe in doing whatever is necessary to test out the idea from every angle." (Intro, p13)

"...we do not want to be held up in production or have the expense of production increased by any possible shortage in a particular material, so we have for most parts worked out substitute materials." (Intro, p14)

[after talking about ways they've improved the manufacturing of the cars]
"If we had devoted all of this energy to making changes in the product we should be nowhere; but by not changing the product we are able to give our energy to the improvement of the making." (Intro, p14)
My Q: So...what's a formulaic way of figuring out when you should focus on making changes in the product and when you should focus on improving the manufacturing of the product? Or how much energy you should invest in each category?

"The principal part of a chisel is the cutting edge...What is the use of putting a tremendous force behind a blunt chisel if a light blow on a sharp chisel will do the work?...The cutting edge of merchandising is the point where the product touches the consumer. An unsatisfactory product is one that has a dull cutting edge. A lot of waste effort is needed to put it through. The cutting edge of a factory is the man and the machine n the job. If the man is not right the machine cannot be; if the machine is not right the man cannot be. For any one to be required to use more force than is absolutely necessary for the job in hand is waste." (Intro, p14-15)

"Given a good idea to start with, it is better to concentrate on perfecting it than to hunt around for a new idea. One idea at a time is about as much as anyone can handle." (Ch1, p17)

"[Growing up on a farm,] there was too much hard hand labour on our own and all other farms of the time. Even when very young I suspected that much might somehow be done in a better way. That is what took me into mechanics..." (Ch1, p17-18)

"There is an immense amount to be learned simply by tinkering with things. It is not possible to learn from books how everything is made--and a real mechanic ought to know how nearly everything is made. Machines are to a mechanic what books are to a writer. He gets ideas from them, and if he has any brains he will apply those ideas." (Ch1, p19)

IBM / Thomas Watson, Sr.

The Maverick and His Machine (re: IBM) by Kevin Maney

...

How to Be Rich by J. Paul Getty

• This book is alright...not as good as I was hoping. A lot of what he says comes off as painfully obvious even if they're lessons that people still ignore, and he doesn't give many interesting anecdotes from his own life to drive home the lessons and make the book more enjoyable to read. The beginning, in which he describes how he became rich, is more interesting.

Joe Lonsdale

• YouTube - Joe Lonsdale
  • This is apparently his YouTube account. (He posted a comment on this video.)
• Google+ - Joe Lonsdale

...

• Soflyy.com
  • We've been building software for the web since 2005.
  • Back in 2008 when we released our first commercial WordPress plugin, the WordPress marketshare was about 10%. Now it's almost 30%.

  • I'm Louis Reingold, the founder & CEO of Soflyy. I've been profitably building software for the web since 2005, when I was 14 years old.

    It seems everyone in our industry has some heroic story about their success, a blog where they share their purported business wisdom, and some page on their website that rambles on about their guiding principles and how enlightened they are.

    We don't do any of that. This company exists to make money, so we try to avoid distractions. We generally avoid blogging, speaking, bragging about our success under the guise of "transparency", attending too many conferences, doing interviews, and anything else that would take our focus away from what matters most: our customers and our products.

    • But I've read from other entrepreneurs that blogging has been an extremely-useful way for them to get traffic from Google...
• LouisReingold.com
  • I learned programming when I was 11 and started building websites when I was 12. I dropped out of high school when I was 16, and I’ve never had a real job.
  • I think companies should pay dividends to their shareholders instead of retaining their earnings and looking for something to do with them.
  • I believe correct premises are extremely important, and a requirement for clear thinking.
    • The video is down...  There's no way to tell what it was.
  • I listen to Theater of the Mind by Ludacris for motivation.
  • I've been playing piano since I was 6. When I was 11, my aunt and uncle bought me a trumpet. I played it for tips on the corner of Hollywood and Vine to get my seed money to register my first domain and build my first website.
• Twitter - LouisReingold
  • This is a great account, it's almost entirely opinions on entrepreneurship.
  • Excerpts: (most recent at the bottom)
    • I have no idea how all these successful entrepreneurs manage to tweet 15 times per day. Aren't you busy building stuff?
    • "I need to be in the same room as my developers" really means "I'm not competent to provide clear specs and my communication skills suck."
    • Your product is too shitty to deserve normal, word-of-mouth recommendations? Launch an affiliate program!
      • Takeaway: Aim to make your product so good that people recommend it to others. This is exactly what Paul Graham says.
    • Don't do business with jerks. The reason we fire problem customers is because our good customers deserve our full, undivided attention.
    • Xerox PARC is proof that good execution matters more than good ideas.
    • If what you sell is useful, it's pretty easy to sell it. If what you sell is useless, you need a sales team.
    • Ship early, ship often, etc. is not a valid excuse to ship crap. What you ship should work properly and be useful.
    • It doesn't matter how good your UX is if you're solving the wrong problems.
    • Want developers to use your API? Make it really. fucking. simple.
    • 1/3 View your business as a machine that makes products. Upgrade the machine to produce better products.
    • 2/3 Sometimes you can just build what you want to build. Sometimes you first need to build the thing that will build what you ultimately want.
    • 3/3 You are that thing. Your tools are that thing. Your team is that thing.
    • (1/2) My thoughts on acquisitions: do it if your company is worth more in their hands than it is in your hands. That's rarely the case.
    • (2/2) Otherwise, you're just selling something for more than you think it's worth. You win, they lose.
      • So...then do it in that case? Or don't do it? This tweet seems to contradict the previous one.
    • "It's the journey, not the destination." is the mantra of those who never achieve their dreams. Personally, I like the destination.
    • Learn to walk before you can run. This is the type of tech company you should build if you aren't yet a millionaire: http://warpspire.com/posts/million-dollar-products
      • Summary of the article:

        • [In the mid-2000s,] the blogs I followed trended toward product launches, and it felt like everyone around me was succeeding. The formula for success seemed simple:

          1. Pick a task that people already use software for (communicate, organize, write, etc).

          2. Build a better piece of software to accomplish the task.

          3. Iterate on it with customer feedback.

          4. Build up enough revenue to quit your job and work on it full time.

        • I can’t help but feel our industry doesn’t think this way anymore.
        • This shift in mindset has made Silicon Valley feel like some kind of Wall Street 2.0 Incubator.
        • I’ve grown to love the concept of a family business over the past few years: [a business run] such that it benefits & reflects the values of the family running it.
        • We don’t really have a concept of family owned software businesses yet, but I do think we can try to emulate the best parts of them. What would that look like?
        • Treat People Well + Make Money + Build Rad Shit
        • if you purposefully put a target on the amount of money you want to make to one million dollars a year [you can avoid the problems associated with "swinging for the fences" / venture capital].
        • TODO: Summarize this middle bit
        • If you want to make a million dollars a year, you don’t need millions (or hundreds of millions) of customers. 12,000 paying customers at $7 per month can do it. That’s not an insurmountable amount of people.
        • TODO: Summarize the rest
    • Find too many good things to do and you won't have time left for the really great things you should be doing.
    • So many people in tech care about what industry peers, media outlets, etc. think of THEM. I care about what my CUSTOMERS think of my PRODUCT
    • Hating flat UI
      I saw demos from @Codrops
      I am a changed man
    • Not feeling inspired? Instead of waiting for an idea to pop into your mind, actively look for problems you can solve.
    • Sell the benefit vs the feature? Who cares? Just clearly tell the customer what your product actually does. If they want it, they'll buy.
    • YouTube Red might motivate Google to make YouTube better. When you are beholden to end-users instead of advertisers, good things happen.
    • Manage managers by making them ask the right questions and look at the right information. Get their focus where it needs to be.
    • Marketing: bad products need a lot, but great products do not. Clearly and concisely conveying what they do is usually more than enough.
      • This seems to be exactly what Elon Musk says. He says, "Don't spend money on anything that doesn't make the product better." But I feel like marketing is partially a matter of making sure that customers who have the problem your products solves will know about you when it comes time for them to choose a solution. So for example, content marketing seems to help raise your Google rank(?), so people doing a search on your topic will see your company.
    • Being first is overrated. Being the best is not. The Wright brothers were first. But I still want a G650.
    • A really easy way to make money is to just copy what's already working, but do a much better job.
    • Your v3.3 is my v1.0
    • If your product is so useless that you need "influential" people to promote it, maybe you should just build something useful instead.
      • This would seem to sort of contradict how Instagram got popular: they contacted influencial photographers on Twitter and got them to Tweet about it.  Maybe Louis is referring to when you need to pay influential people to promote it.
    • UI tip: if it's easy to do something, there must be feedback that the user will interpret negatively if they did it accidentally.
    • Thinking about what users are currently doing is good, but thinking about what users SHOULD be doing is better.
    • Almost every time you do the same thing in two places it's a bad idea.
    • What's obvious to you is not necessarily obvious to others.
    • One of my mantras when designing: "when in doubt, leave it out."
    • If you try to do too much at once, none of it gets done well. So you won't ship. Instead, pick the important things and execute carefully.
    • People who can't clearly see what must be done to succeed at a certain thing often think those who did succeed at it got lucky.

Manoj Bhargava of 5-Hour Energy

...

2012.09.21 - TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2012 - Fireside Chat With Marc Benioff

- He stays very cool when prodded with antagonizing questions.
- He uses the interviewer's name a lot ("Michael"), to the point where it's noticeable and seems affected/artificial.
- He also touches the interviewer a lot (the interviewer even mentions it in the 2014 interview)
---------
- he talks about Dreamforce for a minute or two
- he gives an anecdote about jumping off a bridge
- he talks about his 1/1/1 model: 1% of equity, 1% of profits, 1% of employee hours
08:10 - He talks about Warren Buffett's model. He says Buffett kept being asked by his wife to give away his wealth.
09:40 - They give people 6 paid days a year to go do volunteer work.
11:10 - They start talking about fitbit. He says he's an investor in fitbit. He also has a power balance bracelet.
13:20 - He talks about how he doesn't think about competition as a zero-sum game. It sounds like he doesn't really believe it.
17:10 - He cites a statistic about how by 2017 CMOs will have bigger budgets than CIOs(?)
17:40 - "Why sell when things are going great?" Very interesting.
18:20 - He didn't buy Yammer because he already has Chatterbox and it would've been hard to integrate the two.
20:20 - He talks about Google. He thinks Google isn't going to go after enterprise b/c Larry / Sergey are more interested in other things.
21:00 - He talks about Facebook. Facebook is a big customer of Salesforce.
21:40 - He doesn't think Facebook should have gone for the Nasdaq; he thinks they should have gone for the NYSE.
22:40 - He says Facebook needs to focus on revenue growth. He says they have the opportunity to be the next Google, but they need to figure out what the revenue opportunities are.
23:35 - Salesforce has bought about 25 companies. He talks about what he looks for 
25:00 - He talks about how he uses Hawaii to relax
26:00 - He talks about how his grandfather would go to watch a movie the night before a trial.


2014.09.09 - TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2014 - The Things Marc Benioff Really Cares About
00:00 - Some random comments about the new iPhone and the leaked Kate Upton / Jennifer Lawrence photos.
01:40 - Yesterday Marc announced a venture fund. What's that about? A: It's just a name for what we've already been doing.
02:30 - He talks a little about the companies he's really interested in investing in: companies that use the tech he's already invested in.
04:20 - He says you really hear a gasp when you see enterprise data on wearables.(?) He thinks they're going to be a big part of the enterprise world. He gives Glass as an example.
05:50 - They talk about the growth of Salesforce. They've been having great growth in Europe
- ~06:00 - They talk for a few minutes about Salesforce's philanthropy
~13-14 - The interviewer talks about Marc touching him.
16:15 - Interviewer asks if Marc would be interested in politics. Marc says he has no interest in that. He gives a reason that he likes to say what he wants to say. Michael
19:00 - He asks politicians for four things: 1) H1-Bs and visas, 2) patent reform, 3) the ability to easily move cash from overseas to the US, maybe 15-20%, 4) balanced budget for the US, things like Simpson-Bowles to deal with entitlements
22:50 - Q: What do you think about Apple / Tim Cook? A: He gives 
25:40 - He talks about how he doesn't like when entrepreneurs say they'll give back after they get rich. He goes on for a few minutes.
28:30 - He talks about when he was at Oracle. He joined when he was 21 and was a VP by 25. He says he had a million-dollar salary, a ferari, a condo. But he didn't feel fulfilled. He gives an anecdote about going to India and having some random guru tell some other guy to give back. His delivery seems a lot more believable than Aaron Levie's.

Masayoshi (Masa) Son of SoftBank

...

2011? - Max Levchin at Startup School

- General thought: It's interesting to see the difference between how Levchin talks about himself and how Peter Thiel talks about himself. Thiel projects an attitude of extreme confidence while Levchin is more self-deprecating. I can't remember Thiel ever saying anything self-deprecating.

00:30 - He never plans these talks.
02:10 - One thing he was asked to talk about was founders and cofounders.
- He started 4 companies, all of them failed, the 5th one was PayPal.
2:40 - He has a story about a moment when he thought, "Holy shit, I picked the wrong cofounder..."
- Thiel lived in a nice complex when they started PayPal. Levchin lived within walking distance from there.
03:50 - They were talking about how they were going to take over the world until 2am.
- He had moved to Palo Alto 6 months before starting PayPal.
- He had the thought, "Wow, I shouldn't have started a company with him, he'll just abandon me..."

5:10 - He made a list of top mistakes as an entrepreneur
5:30 - He thinks it's not always necessary to get a cofounder.
- He didn't have a cofounder for Slide, and it didn't come close to PayPal's level of success.
6:37 - Peter was arguing very convincingly that the markets were about to crash.
7:03 - LOL - He points out that Thiel ALWAYS predicts doom-and-gloom.
- They had 9 weeks of cash in 2000.
8:24 - He says Thiel is not a warm-and-fuzzy guy.
8:30 - Thiel was talking to Yakuza to raise money, they wired them money without being given instructions to do it.
09:15 - He says the warmest moment he had with Thiel was when Thiel said, "Don't worry about it, we'll raise the money."
09:50 - He says the job of a great cofounder is to provide a platform of support when you most need it.
10:22 - They didn't have to take a valuation hit when Thiel raised the money.
10:40 - You can start a company on your own, but you really need someone there to support you and tell you you're not fucked when you think you are.

11:45 - Picking a cofounder you have a hard time dealing with, or you don't want to impress on occasion.
12:15 - Thiel was giving a lecture about financial systems when Levchin met


12:40 - Levchin says that over the next few months they would meet in coffee shops and throw each other math puzzles and 

13:25 - Levchin started a company with a guy he was super impressed with.
13:50 - The cofounder was trying to sell something.

14:45 - When you ever get a feeling like, "Ooh, this isn't going to work", then break up immediately. Don't put it off.
- It's hard because a lot of the time the other person will be someone you really respect.

15:35 - His favorite movie quote of all time is, "Whenever there's any doubt, there's no doubt."

15:55 - One of his favorite mistakes:
- You'll find a high-level engineer who is very well-liked, and you know the person is a net-negative: they're creating a faction, or they're a nasty person. You need to get rid of that person ASAP. It's really hard.

17:35 - Firing people is probably the most painful thing, especially when you like the person.

18:20 - He's going to teach us how to fire people:
- Sit the person down and say, "I'd like to ask you to resign." It really works.

19:30 - A classic engineering mistake: Confusing "hard" and "valuable"
- When I was young I'd run into a hard problem and assume that solving it I'd get some great things. The reality is that really, really valuable things are frequently pretty hard. However, there are many hard things that aren't really valuable.
- 21:00 - Example: the original name of PayPal was FieldLink. They wanted to build a PDA and would create a secure VPN into the company. The problem was the PDAs were severely underpowered.

22:28 - Peter put a bunch of money into Levchin's idea and went around trying to pitch it.

23:40 - The big issue he ignored: nobody wanted to read their corporate email on a PDA. The idea was too ahead of its time. There were only 1 million PDAs, and most of them were owned by consumers.

24:40 - Don't let your office become a dump. It's just going to get worse.

25:20 - When Slide got acquired by Google they were in their 4th office, and the office was really a dump.

25:55 - Story: [Side-note: Levchin says he doesn't watch TV.] He tells a story of a VC who told him his business plan was the "Underpants Gnome" business plan: 1. Solve problem 2. ? 3. Profit!

27:35 - The single most annoying thing he sees when evaluating potential angel investments is underpants-gnome thinking (and he still hasn't seen the episode).

28:20 - Fear of failure and fear of judgment is a big issue.
28:40 - For a few years after PayPal he 
- If you have a successful company in your past you can really cruise: you can raise money at a high valuation, and people won't call you 
29:50 - Nothing really matters in starting a company other than passion for the product. You can't waste time thinking about "How will this look to others?"

31:20 - Last piece of advice: Are you doing the things you're good at? Don't worry about your mistakes! If you're an amazing coder, maybe you shouldn't be trying to be a CEO.

McDonald's / Ray Kroc

Grinding it Out: The Making of McDonald's by Ray Kroc

This book is a riot; Kroc was very intelligent, had a lot of attitude, wasn't afraid to scream and swear, loved to make money and wasn't ashamed of it. the book moves fast and sticks to the essentials, which seems appropriate considering those are the qualities that made McDonald's so successful in the first place.

I ate my fair share of McDonald's when I was younger, and while I haven't gone to one in a long time, and I'm not happy about some of the problems McDonald's seems to create, after reading this book I have to admit that the company has done quite a lot of good. The basic execution that made them successful was to do things /faster/, offer /better/ tasting food for /cheaper/, and have /cleaner/ restaurants. By figuring out the best-possible way of doing things and then standardizing them, they were aiming to help spread good ideas and improve quality. Nowadays people are a bit more health conscious and worried about the effects of all this greasy food, but when McDonald's was coming up in the world people weren't really thinking about it (or at least, that's my impression). You could take the McDonald's franchise model and apply it to anything you want, including super-healthy food.

*******************
Chronology of Success
*******************

- he got work experience while still a kid: setting up a lemonade stand, working at a grocery school one summer while in grammar school, working at his uncle's drug store. he started a music store with a friend but it failed
- while still in his late teens / early 20s he worked as a paper cup salesman by day and a piano player on a radio station at night. this was back when paper cups were a completely new thing that most people had never seen before. and paper cups were also not as good back then as they were now; they weren't as stiff.
- he was a better salesman than most: he made sure he dressed sharp, he took care of his customers so that they would trust him (e.g. telling his customers when his company was about to raise prices so that the customers could stock up ahead of time and save money).
- he spent around 20 years in the paper cup business as a salesman, gradually rising up through the ranks and having people under him (leadership experience). he became comfortable making deals with large companies for large quantities of paper cups (which would presumably help him when forming McDonald's).
- 

*************
Notable Quotes
*************

114-115
I have had people with us who seriously proposed that we plant spies in the operations of our competition. Can you imagine? Next thing we'd learn that Ronald McDonald is a double agent! My response to that kind of claptrap has always been that you can learn all you ever need to know about the competition's operation by looking in his garbage cans. I am not above that, let me assure you, and more than once at two o'clock in the morning I have sorted through a competitor's garbage to see how many boxes of meat he'd used the day before, how many packages of buns, and so forth.

Michael Bloomberg of Bloomberg L.P.

...

Interviewer: But your wealth has helped you get things done politically.
Bloomberg: Well, John Lindsay, he’s a good-looking guy—all right, that’s an advantage too. I come with a different advantage. There are people that had great educations at Ivy League schools. I was a straight-C student at Johns Hopkins. Don’t ask me how I ever got into Harvard Business School. Now [Harvard president] Drew Faust is asking for my advice on education. But let’s get serious as to why.

You can come from all different backgrounds. The real question is, do you have the desire and the willingness and the creativity and the moxie? And that’s all in your head. When people say, “It’s not fair, you had an advantage,” I’m thinking, Well, they had an advantage—they went to better schools, or they came from wealthier families. My father was a bookkeeper. He worked seven days a week until he checked himself into the hospital to die. My mother went the next day to the library, got a book on driving, taught herself to drive on our quiet street, because she said, “I’m gonna have to be the chauffeur from now on.”

I know what hard work’s about. I still come back to what my strategy always was and will continue to be: I’m not the smartest guy, but I can outwork you. It’s the one thing that I can control.

Interviewer: You’ve been a Democrat. You’ve been a Republican. You’re currently an Independent. Which party do you feel closest to now?
Bloomberg: I would describe myself as a social liberal and a fiscal conservative. But I think I’m too liberal for the liberals, because I actually try to deliver the services rather than just promise them. If they delivered everything they promised, nobody could afford it. I actually am a conservative more so than other conservatives in the sense that I think you could go and cut 2 or 3 percent out of the budget in every agency. We’ve done that twelve times, and we’ve cut roughly a billion and a half and there’s six-odd billion that’s recurring, and you can go and cut people or find other revenue sources. There are ways to do those things.

...

Bloomberg by Bloomberg w/ Matthew Winkler

I was hooked from the first chapter. Bloomberg comes off as a much more interesting and lively person in this book than he appears in his speeches as mayor of NYC. He throws out a lot of great anecdotes and bits of advice for people interested in being successful at what they do.

************
Main Thoughts
************
- Bloomberg's story seems VERY similar to Carnegie's. Both spent 15 years in their industry before starting their company: gradually working their way up from within a large organization, developing contacts, gaining insight into how a particular market worked, working their butt off, etc.

- He happened to spend the EXACT SAME AMOUNT OF TIME in his industry as BOTH Sam Walton and Andrew Carnegie did in theirs before starting the businesses that would make them rich. 15 years in all three cases. But in Sam Walton's case, he didn't really have as much of a "boss" as the other guys. Although Sam was still operating within a larger organization: the Ben's Five-and-Dime chain. So Sam still had to deal with higher-ups, even if not as frequently as Carnegie and Bloomberg.

******************
Chronology of Success
******************

- Went to Johns Hopkins, did academically poorly because he wasn't motivated (C grades), BUT:
- Just like Sam Walton, he was the "big man on campus", and organized all kinds of events. He also ran for student government, etc.\
- He was accepted to Harvard Business School. He said that while there were some smart people there, there were some others he wasn't impressed with. Same impression I got when visiting HLS. He did say that many of those relationships became useful to him later in life.
- After graduating he had no idea what to do, so a friend told him to call up Salomon Bros and ask for a job. At that time securities trading was not the popular industry it is now, so it was easy to get in.
- He then spent 15 years working harder than anyone else around him (just like Carnegie), gradually working his way up from the scummiest work to positions of big responsibility (just like Carnegie).
- After 15 years he was fired when Salomon Bros merged with another company, but was given a $10 million severance.
- He used that money to start a new company, which became Bloomberg.
- The new company was designed to fix a problem he saw in the market he had spent the past 15 years working in. Because of that investment in time he was able to identify a lucrative problem, get the right people to work for him, put in the up-front investment to get the project going, and get the attention of the customers he would need to buy his product. Just like Carnegie.


********
Questions
********

Q: Was it really necessary that he work for 15 years at Salomon Bros before starting the business that made him rich?
A: Hmm...it seems like it would have been much more difficult if he had started earlier. He had 3 cofounders, all of whom had been forced out of Salomon at the same time as him (iirc); he prob. would not have been able to get them to leave the company earlier. If he had started his company alone, it isn't clear 1) if he would have spotted the opportunity that he did, or 2) how likely he would have been able to get a finished product to a first customer.

Nikolai Durov / Pavel Durov / Telegram / VK

...

• 2012.11 - Ray Kurzweil "How to Create a Mind", Authors at Google

Richard Branson / Virgin

Losing My Virginity

• This is the most intimidating autobiography I've ever read. Richard Branson is something else.

Ross Perot / Electronic Data Systems (EDS)

...

• 2016.09.27 - YCombinator - Sam Altman : How to Build the Future

  • 13:00 - Ask for what you want. People aren't aggressive

  • 13:50 - Crises get less scary over time.

  • 16:20 - One of the remaining ways you can beat the market is by willing to put a lot of time into something.
  • 18:45 - He's noticed that the most-successful people tend to have strong opinions about the future.

Sam Wyly

Chronology of Success

[adapted from wikipedia]

After receiving his MBA, Wyly moved to Dallas to work as a salesman at IBM's Service Bureau Corporation. Three and a half years later he left IBM to become the area sales manager for Honeywell, establishing their computer business in Dallas and Oklahoma. Wyly's wealth comes from businesses that he founded and developed, or purchased and expanded;

1963: founded University Computing Company (UCC), which provided computer services to engineers, scientists, and researchers with Sun Oil Company, Texas Instruments, and others. He began the company with $1,000 and three customers;. The company went public in 1965. By 1968, sales were $60 million; in 1971, they were $125 million.

1967: With his brother Charles, bought the restaurant chain Bonanza Steakhouse. He had initially started investing in it with money from the sale of stock in UCC. The company grew to approximately 600 restaurants by 1989, when the two brothers sold it.

1968: Acquired Gulf Insurance; at the time, the company had free equity of $52 million and $63 million unrealized capital gains.

Co-founded Earth Resources Company, an oil refining and silver and gold mining company, served as its Executive Committee Chairman from 1968 to 1980.

1970: Purchased Computer Technology, which functioned as the in-house data processing unit for LTV, for $40 million in cash and notes.

1972: Sold a computer terminal business to Harris-Intertype, writing off $32 million in investments.

1973: Divided UCC into four companies, including Datran, which began construction of a nationwide system of microwave towers to transmit data among 27 American cities in direct competition with AT&T.

1981: Co-founded Sterling Software. The company was sold to Computer Associates in 2000 for $4 billion.

1982: Bought controlling interest in an arts-and-crafts chain Michaels; the company's revenues grew from $10 million at the time of purchase to $1.24 billion by 1996. In July 2006, Bain Capital and the Blackstone Group purchased the company for $6 billion.

1986: Purchased Frost Bros., a specialty retail chain, from Manhattan Industries. After failing to reorganize while operating under bankruptcy protection, the company was liquidated in mid-1989.

In 1990, co-founded hedge fund Maverick Capital, which by 2003 had about $8 billion in assets. Beginning in 1993, his son Evan, a Maverick co-founder, and money manager Lee S. Ainslie III managed the fund.

As of 2006, Wyly was the largest stockholder of clean-energy producer Green Mountain Energy.

In 2006 Wyly also was the largest investor in the online social networking company Zaadz.com at an estimated 1.5m.

In March 2007, Forbes magazine estimated Wyly's net worth to be $1.1 billion. In September 2006, Forbes ranked him as the 354th wealthiest American.

1,000 Dollars & an Idea by Sam Wyly

Finished this book April 11th, 2010. Sam Wyly is a very smart guy.

About Wyly:
- He's basically another techie billionaire like Bill Gates, Ross Perot, and Michael Bloomberg. He started as a salesman for IBM, became a millionaire by starting a company that sold computing power to businesses in the 70s, then started experimenting with different business ventures (e.g. a restaurant chain, an arts and crafts chain), and became a billionaire in his 50s by knowing how to game the stock market. this is all based off my year-old memory of the book, though; i could be wrong about some of this.
- note that just like Sam Walton, he spent much of his business life working with his brother.

Notable Quotes

• p.242 - “Reading perhaps a thousand biographies from the time I was in high school had helped and inspired me. I’d learned so much by reading about the lives and work of people like Andrew Carnegie, Tom Watson, Sam Walton, and Helen Keller.”
• p.244 - “Once, when I was asked how I could have a 199 percent return on an investment fund I was managing in a year that was not good in general, I answered, “I read a lot.” The questioner laughed. But I wasn’t joking. It’s true. I do read all the time. What I’m trying to say is that having good timing is a result of paying attention to the ideas and trends floating around out there, studying them, coming to some intellectual conclusions, and then, ultimately, listening to your own gut about how to apply your conclusions to the business ventures you elect to pursue.”

Slack / Stewart Butterfield

...

Chipotle: The Definitive Oral History
http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015- ... l-history/
- this is a fantastic article.
- main takeaways (just from memory):
-- it seems like pairing up with McDonald's was crucial to the magnitude of their success.
-- his product was an immediate hit with his very first restaurant. This is something I've seen many times in the autobiographies of successful entrepreneurs. So if your product isn't a huge success, think hard about tweaking it.
-- They did a lot of things differently from what the conventional fast-food wisdom would suggest (eg no drive-through, no breakfast, a simple menu, an assembly-line-style setup). The executives at McDonald's and other chains were assuming that things couldn't be any other way.
-- He took a product that was excellent but not widespread (tacquerias) and brought it to the rest of the country. This reminds me of Sam Walton gathering all of the good ideas used by retailers across the country, gathering them into one store, and then taking that vastly-superior product and mass-producing it.
-- Their original location didn't have the assembly-line format; they got the assembly-line idea from their second store, which had previously been a "House of Pies" restaurant chain. They think House of Pies had just used the long display to show off their selection of pies, but Chipotle saw how they could repurpose it to serve meals more quickly.


2011.08.24 - Chipotle Story - How it All Started
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmH73Diqf5Q

2014.07.22 - Forbes - Why Chipotle's Founder Isn't A Burrito Billionaire (And May Never Be)
http://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomo ... -never-be/

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Ted Turner / TBS / CNN / TNT / TCM / Cartoon Network

Call Me Ted by Ted Turner

his dad had worked his way up to the low-multi-million-dollar level w/ a billboard business. ted was made to work summers for the company from around age 12. his dad died when ted was only 24, and ted took over and started expanding aggressively.

Thomas Edison

• Amazon - The Wizard of Menlo Park

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Tony Hsieh (LinkExchange, Zappos)

This guy has done a fantastic job of making use of the knowledge of others.

• 2010.07.19 - YouTube - Talks @ Google - Tony Hsieh
  • Fantastic lecture; this guy is very smart
  • 46:35 - If people are bad at predicting what will make them happy, you shouldn't necessarily be striving to give them what they say they want.
• 2010.05.17 - YouTube - Loic Le Meur - Tony Hsieh of Zappos advice on entrepreneurship
  • Key ideas:
    • Set up the business so that you'd be happy doing it for 10 years even if you don't make any money (connection w/ my "sustainability" argument re: motivation)
    • Set up the business around a culture; he describes it in terms of people you like hanging out with vs. people you DONT like hanging out with

Another chat:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZpU8oIT8tM
- new bit of info: they run a separate website, 6pm.com, to handle discounted stuff at the end of the season (~12mins in)

• 2010.05.26 - HuffPo - Tony Hsieh - What Poker Taught Me About Business
  • One of the best articles I've ever read on entrepreneurship.
  • "I learned from a book that an experienced player can make ten times as much money sitting at a table with nine mediocre players who are tired and have a lot of chips compared with sitting at a table with nine really good players who are focused and don’t have that many chips in front of them."
    
  • "In business, one of the most important decisions for an entrepreneur or a CEO to make is what business to be in. It doesn’t matter how flawlessly a business is executed if it’s the wrong business or if it’s in too small a market.
    

    Imagine if you were the most efficient manufacturer of seven-fingered gloves. You offer the best selection, the best service, and the best prices for seven-fingered gloves–but if there isn’t a big enough market for what you sell, you won’t get very far.

    Or, if you decide to start a business that competes directly against really experienced competitors such as Wal-Mart by playing the same game they play (for example, trying to sell the same goods at lower prices), then chances are that you will go out of business."

• 2012.12.20 - Kevin Rose interview with Tony Hsieh
• He started with RadioShack computers in elementary school that had him transcribing programs (a lot like the Arduino tutorials and Elenco 130-in-1 boards).
• The turning point for him with technology was late middle school / early high school, when he got into BBS (bulletin-board system). He says a big thing was reading about another person his age who had created a BBS, and so he thought "well if he can do it, I can do it". He taught himself Pascal. He wrote a clone of the 16-year-old's BBS. He says he majored in CS more out of laziness ("I know how to do this, so I guess I'll do this.").
• 4:30 - His parents were really strick: they'd make him do an hour of piano, an hour of violin, an hour of trumpet, and then studying for the SATs (in middle school). His parents weren't encouraging of his computer hobby.
• 5:50 - He went to work for Oracle after college for 5 months and decided the corporate lifestyle wasn't for him.
• 7:30 - His first company (LinkExchange) was borne more out of boredom.
• 10:00 - Hsieh's website was dedicated to Bomberman, and so that was the first official member of LinkExchange.
• 10:30 - They had a system where, for every 2 page views on your website, you earned 1 ad to be placed on another website. It was a credit system. So they would end up with a surplus of ads that they could sell to Toyota etc. He gives an example of something cool that he mentioned to companies: it would be like if you could suddenly have every billboard on a highway display your ad at a particular time of day (say, 5pm).
• 12:20 - At the time, they had more reach than Yahoo.
• 12:40 - When they started they needed to have their own server.

Twitter

Misc articles / Videos

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Wikipedia - Uber
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uber_(company)

Lesson: It may be good to have powerful people invested in your company. They can help you get through big fights, and other people may decide it's better to jump on the bandwagon instead of backing an alternative.

Wikipedia - Garrett Camp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garrett_Camp

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2010.12.22 - Uber Blog - Uber's Founding
http://blog.uber.com/2010/12/22/ubers-founding/


2014.08.19 - Washington Post - Uber hired David Plouffe when it realized ‘techies’ can’t do politics
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/won ... -politics/
- another example of bringing on a powerful ally

2015.09.08 - Fast Company - What Makes Uber Run

http://www.fastcompany.com/3050250/what-makes-uber-run

 - This is a really interesting article.

Travis Kalanick

• Wikipedia - Travis Kalanick

  • Scour
    In 1998, Kalanick dropped out of UCLA and with some of his classmates to found Scour Inc., a multimedia search engine, and Scour Exchange, a peer-to-peer file-exchange service. In 2000, the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) brought a lawsuit against Scour, alleging copyright infringement. In September of that year Scour filed for bankruptcy to protect itself from the lawsuit.

    Red Swoosh
    In 2001, with Scour's engineering team, Kalanick started a new company called Red Swoosh, another peer-to-peer file-sharing company. Red Swoosh software took advantage of increased bandwidth efficiency on the Internet to allow users to transfer and trade large media files, including music files and videos. In 2007, Akamai Technologies acquired the company for $19 million.

    Uber
    In 2009, along with Garrett Camp, Kalanick founded Uber, a mobile application that connects passengers with drivers of vehicles for hire and ridesharing services.

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• 2013.02.25 - Gamasutra - How Valve hires, how it fires, and how much it pays
  • Very interesting.

Walmart / Sam Walton

Sam Walton: Made in America by Sam Walton with John Huey

I was initially a little skeptical about how much information he'd give away in this book, but after having read it i can say this is a must-read for anyone who wants to succeed in business (or ANYTHING, really). there are a ton of very useful ideas and anecdotes; it really is a "this is step-by-step how i did it" book. he comes off as one of the most energetic and driven individuals i've ever heard of.

Main Ideas

• He searched for EVERY possible good idea with everyone he met and every discount store he passed by. the guy would routinely talk to people for two and a half hours about everything they did in their own stores; he'd take notes with a yellow legal pad (later with an audio recorder). he was always looking for good ideas. one story that I've never forgotten was how, when Walton was already rich and famous, another guy just happened to find himself on an elevator with Walton, and wanted to ask Walton how he'd managed to be successful. when they parted ways the guy realized that he'd learned little about Walton while Walton had learned a lot of information about him (even though the guy wasn't a retailer). I think i read this anecdote in Wyly's autobiography.
• Walmart's success was not the result of one good idea, but rather thousands and thousands of good ideas that were gradually compounded over many years.
• on the other hand, the innovation of "discounting" seems integral to their success: discounting is when you sell items for less and end up making more money b/c people buy way more of the product when it's cheaper. making discounting work required innovations in distribution and inventory management, which is a lot of what wal-mart focused on. non-discounting stores were called "variety" stores, and later the market saw the spread of "wholesale" stores (Sam's Club, Costco, BJ's) and stores that served areas not populous enough for a Wal-Mart (the Dollar Generals and Family Dollars).
• He's always been competitive
• He thinks his most important quality in making Wal-Mart successful was his ability to motivate people to work together as a team

Chronology of Success

• as a young kid he got experience selling magazines; his dad was also an enthusiastic haggler and would make people outrageous offers (it seems almost for sport)
• in high school he was already getting involved in as many activities as possible but wasn't particularly amazing at any of them; he was able to end up QB as an upperclassman b/c 1) he had more experience going in as a freshman, and 2) the team did mostly running plays. this is important because:
• in college he did the same thing (joined lots of groups) but also "ran for every office that came along"; he became president of senior men's honor society, officer in his frat, president of senior class, captain/president of ROTC's scabbard and blade. lots of leadership experience.
• he was a business major in college
• while in HS/college he was getting business experience: "I had continued to throw a newspaper route all through high school, and in college I added a few more routes, hired a few helpers, and turned it into a pretty good business. I made about $4,000 to $5,000 a year, which at the end of the Depression was fairly serious money". I looked it up and that's the 2009 equivalent of between $60,000 and $76,000 a year. apparently he also got a lot of his frat buddies to sign up for newspaper subscriptions.

Notable Quotes

• 14 - "...I think that record [of never playing in a losing football game] had an important effect on me. It taught me to expect to win, to go into tough challenges always planning to come out victorious. Later on in life, I think Kmart, or whatever competition we were facing, just became Jeff City High School, the team we played for the state championship in 1935. It never occurred to me that I might lose; to me, it was almost as if I had a right to win. Thinking like that often seems to turn into sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy."
  • [note: Felix Dennis has said the very same thing about negative thinking: it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy]
• 22 - “I was twenty-seven years old and full of confidence, but I didn’t know the first thing about how to evaluate a proposition like this so I jumped right in with both feet. I bought it for $25,000--$5,000 of our own money and $20,000 borrowed from Helen’s father.”
• 27 - “As good as business was, I never could leave well enough alone, and, in fact, I think my constant fiddling and meddling with the status quo may have been one of my biggest contributions to the later success of Wal-Mart.”
• Anecdote: His competitor was going to expand into an adjacent store so Sam convinced the owner to sell it to him instead and put in a barely-profitable business.
• 28 - Bud Walton: “That Newport [Ben Franklin] store was really the beginning of where Wal-Mart is today. We did everything. We would wash windows, sweep floors, trim windows. We did all the stockroom work, checked the freight in. Everything it took to run a store. We had to keep our expenses to a minimum. That is where it started, years ago. Our money was made by controlling expenses. That, and Sam always being ingenious. He never stopped trying to do something different.”
• 29 - “Church is an important part of society, especially in small towns. Whether it’s the contacts and associations you make or the contributions you might make toward helping other folks, it all sort of ties in together.”
• “I was a member of the church’s board of deacons, was active in the Rotary Club, and had become president of the Chamber of Commerce as well as head of its industrial committee. I was pretty much involved in everything around town.”
• "Every crazy thing we tried hadn’t turned out as well as the ice cream machine, of course, but we hadn’t made any mistakes we couldn’t correct quickly, none so big that they threatened the business.”
• 33 - Anecdote: Sam heard about two stores going to self-service, so he “rode the bus all night long” to see them and then did it in his own store.
  ["self-service" is what all stores do now and what we all take for granted; in the past, though, all the products would be behind the counter, so you'd need to get an employee to grab every item you wanted to buy. way less efficient.]
• 34 - Inez Threet, clerk: “I guess Mr. Walton just had a personality that drew people in. He would yell at you from a block away, you know. He would just yell at everybody he saw, and that’s the reason so many liked him and did business in the store. It was like he brought in business by his being so friendly. [...] He was always thinking up new things to try in the store. [anecdote about his introducing thong/zori sandals]”
• 35 - “Of course I needed somebody to run my new store, and I didn’t have much money, so I did something I would do for the rest of my run in the retail business without any shame or embarrassment whatsoever: nose around other people’s stores searching for good talent.”
• 36 - [anecdote about going in 50-50 with another variety store owner to make their own cheap Hula Hoops during the height of the fad]
• “...most everything I’ve done I’ve copied from somebody else...”
• 37 - on opening his second store with his brother Bud: “We borrowed all the money we could and went into that Ben Franklin fifty-fifty.”
• 39 - [on his failed attempt to open a shopping center after his second Ben Franklin store was in a shopping center and made a ton of money]:
  “When I saw that shopping center catch on the way it did I thought, ‘Man, this is the forerunner of many, many things to come.’ And I decided--with no money to amount to anything--to go into the shopping center development business myself back in Arkansas. [...] I probably spent two years going around trying to sell people on the idea of shopping centers in Arkansas in the middle fifties--which was about ten years too early. I finally got an option on one piece of property and talked Kroger and Woolworth into signing leases, based on us getting this one street paved. I started raising money for the pavement, but it got real complicated, and in the end I decided I had better take my whipping, so I backed out of the whole deal and went back to concentrating on the retail business. I probably lost $25,000, and that was at a time when Helen and I were counting every dollar. It was probably the biggest mistake of my business career. I did learn a heck of a lot about the real estate business from the experience, and maybe it paid off somewhere down the line--though I would rather have learned it some cheaper way. Incidentally, after I dropped my option on that last piece of land, a well-known young fellow named Jack Stephens--who had a whole lot more money than I did--went on to develop a successful shopping center that’s still there.”
  Lesson: Certain business opportunities are only open to people with enough money to execute the idea, even if lots of other people can see the money-making potential of the idea. Analogy: You can be watching a sports game and see that a player should do X, but you're not in the position to actually make use of that insight.
• David Glass: “Two things about Sam Walton distinguish him from almost everyone else I know. First, he gets up every day bound and determined to improve something. Second, he is less afraid of being wrong than anyone I’ve ever known. And once he sees he’s wrong, he just shakes it off and heads in another direction.”
• 41 - “Whatever money we made in one store, we’d put it in another new one, and just keep on going. Also, from Willard Walker on, we would offer to bring the managers we hired in as limited partners. If you had, say, a $50,000 investment in a store, and the manager put in $1,000, he’d own 2 percent.”
• very useful information on how he expanded
  • 41-42 - “In fifteen years’ time, we had become the largest independent variety store operator on the United States. But the business itself seemed a little limited. The volume was so little per store that it really didn’t amount to that much. I mean, after fifteen years--in 1960--we were only doing $1.4 million in fifteen stores. By now, you know me. I began looking around hard for whatever new idea would break us over into something with a little better payoff for all our efforts.”

Walt Disney

• Amazon - Walt Disney
  • Apparently one of the Airbnb cofounders is a big fan of Walt Disney and this book

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