This is a point that I think is missed regularly: if you believe that the Internet offers an opportunity to challenge an incumbent, success comes not from replacing the incumbent directly but rather from transforming the entire value chain.
The tricky thing is that most of these skills are catch-22s. How do you know to search for when you don’t know what you’re supposed to learn? How do you decompose a problem into steps when you don’t understand a problem? How do you know what the best guide is for each step when you don’t know how that step works?
Historically, education has been a challenging sector for new company creation. The industry is highly regulated, and new products typically need to sell into schools, which have slow sales cycles and inconsistent decision makers: at one school, the principal may make the purchase decision; at another, the science teacher; at another, the district ... See more
Ultimately, leading players want to take over the rest of the finance space leveraging their user base, technology and brand. Payment companies doing loans. Payroll providers starting to act like aggregators of services. Accounting solutions doing planning. Expense management platforms doing procurement.
Om Malik blog post : "I wonder if this culture of participation was helping build businesses on our collective backs. If we tag, bookmark, or share and help del.icio.us or Technorati or Yahoo become better commerical entities, aren't we commoditizing our most valuable asset: time? We become the outsourced workforce, though it is still unclear what ... See more
Andy Coravos: When people ask what you do, they really seem to be asking who you are, putting the attention on people’s credentials within institutions (the nouns) rather than on their actions and contributions (how they live, work, and cultivate knowledge in their fields). Expertise is equated with the former, when it should be more about the latt... See more