Sublime

the end of 1996, Viaweb had attracted only seventy customers, but this reflected Graham’s dictum of “get big slow.” With few customers, he and his two colleagues were able to make improvements to the software much more easily.10

The wheels of corporate change are notoriously slow, particularly when it comes to fundamental transformations. But one major corporation managed to reinvent itself not just once—but twice—in record time. Netflix started out by disrupting the traditional video rental model by shipping DVDs through the mail. But even as the company began to corner t

Gibson Biddle, former VP of Product Management at Netflix, called this approach part of their “DHM model”, which stands for Delighting customers in Hard-to-copy, Margin-enhancing ways.

Slack (Searchable Log of All Communications and Knowledge).

Amazon executives reasoned that day that they had the Internet’s most authoritative product catalog and that they should exploit it. That, it turned out, was the central insight that not only turned Amazon into a thriving platform for small online merchants but powers a good deal of its success today.

So Bezos suggested that the personalization team develop a much simpler system, one that made recommendations based on books that customers had already bought. Eric Benson took about two weeks to construct a preliminary version that grouped together customers who had similar purchasing histories and then found books that appealed to the people in e