Sublime

The truth is that no business plan survives a collision with a real customer. So the trick is to take your idea and set it on a collision course with reality as soon as possible.

But you want something that will scale,” he said. “You want to sell something where the effort it takes to sell a dozen is identical to the effort it takes to sell just one. And while you’re at it, try and find something that’s more than just a onetime sale, so that once you’ve found a customer, you’ll be able to sell to them over and over again.”

(A video store – think of it being like Amazon Prime or Netflix, but in boxes.)

“I wanted to do something different, to give the individual the power to be a producer as well as a consumer.”

Growth alone isn’t the endgame; scaling to meet customer demand is. Above all, these upstarts prize the human touch – albeit with no physical presence – in every customer interaction and in all aspects of their business.

A leader can create a company, but a community creates a movement.

community among members, and to tailor recommendations to individual tastes.

but the transactions were too infrequent. We needed a smaller niche market segment with a higher velocity of money—a segment we found in eBay “PowerSellers,” the professional vendors who sold goods online through eBay’s auction marketplace.