Unsurprisingly, hiring friends and former colleagues was by far the biggest channel. This also in part explains why multi-time founders, and anyone with a large network (e.g. Y Combinator), have an advantage:
“All of our early hires were friends/ex-coworkers.”
“First hires were practically all former colleagues. Several people who worked with me in
Our ideas, too, will disappoint us if we don’t give them the right environment to develop in. They’ll be shallow, derivative, dull, repetitive, or take too long to show up. Or they’ll just not show up at all. We must find the perfect glass jar and lid for them to appear in.
What is that perfect glass jar, though? Our ideas appear primarily in one... See more
And, as Jeff's annual letter to shareholders has emphasized from the very first instance, Amazon's mission is to be the world's most customer-centric company. One way to continue to find vectors for growth is to stay attached at the hip to the fickle nature of customer unhappiness, which they're always quite happy to share under the right... See more
As the former CEO of both Data Domain and ServiceNow, two successful tech companies in recent years, I am often confronted with questions: what did you guys do? What is the secret sauce? How did you do it? We never thought of ourselves as that different. We certainly didn’t think we had stumbled on a silver bullet. Did we just get incredibly lucky... See more
In Curators are the new Creators, Gaby argues that this will create opportunities for curators — increasingly, we will pay people with good taste to help us sort through the ever-growing mass of information.
The business of good taste has been well documented. There are plenty of businesses that address the question “what should I read?”; The... See more
Some of the best startup ideas live in a grey area of legality. Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, YouTube, Coinbase were all somewhere between questionable and flat-out illegal in their early days.
One reason for this is that incumbents cannot take any legal risk on a new initiative. Even if Google execs saw Uber and thought "that... See more