“Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.”
Acquisitions: The company has used M&A as an important growth tool. As per Ben Thompson’s about their Slack acquisition, “the fact that the company “buys growth” is often held up as a criticism, but the truth is
Of course, all of this is really just describing the difference between high gross margin and low gross margin companies. These can both be perfectly ‘good’ companies (“there’s no such thing as a bad company, just a bad price”), but you have to remember the difference, and it’s surprisingly easy to forget. People really did think that Facebook... See more
But this is less of a systemic problem than in the past, because the web has massively eroded the power of gatekeepers to suppress and control speech. I was among the first to recognize this potential for individual freedom of speech, and helped pioneer individual online media, specifically blogging, 20 years ago.
Unfortunately, we never cracked how to get huge by going direct. Our customers loved us, we just couldn’t get enough of them. We were growing. Our high fixed costs meant that we had to grow at a pace that we never were able to reach though.