An astonishing 90% of Cisco’s revenue runs through its partners.

They’re driven by working together. If they were going to work alone, it would be a lot less interesting. They want to solve very hard problems, whether technical, business design, or empire design. They care a lot about progress and the speed of innovation. They care a lot about power law people; they want to attract those people, partner with

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People are inclined to want to do great work for really rich and successful people. They see it as their ticket. Drawing that out of people before most even know about your company, on the other hand... that’s a skill worth studying.

I guess there is one thing replicable: a lot of outbound. A couple of months ago, he came across someone doing really interesting work on YouTube with just hundreds of views and sent him a note. “This happens a lot on GitHub, too,” he said. “Someone will write really good open source libraries and 20 people will download.” Send them a note. The... See more

my entire investment thesis is that startups have the opportunity to overtake sclerotic incumbents with vertically integrated offerings that are better, cheaper, faster and higher-margin.

Painful software plus good distribution and high switching costs is a hard combination to kill.

So the two parts:

1. Put what you want into the world, over and over, for a long time.


2. Be a person other people want to do things well for.

Sunil and Anil spent five years, just the two of them, in China and back home, doing R&D. Learning, tinkering, thinking. They didn’t hire Meter’s first employee until five years in, until they knew what they wanted to build, and how.

There’s something quite deep about the notion of using time horizons as a competitive advantage , in that you’re simply willing to wait longer than other people and you have an organization that is thusly oriented.