Sublime

The founding moment of a company, however, really does happen just once: only at the very start do you have the opportunity to set the rules that will align people toward the creation of value in the future.

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.”

In 1912, after a long-fought lawsuit brought against them under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, Edison and the Motion Picture Patents Company lost their stranglehold on movie production technology, meaning that the independents could now operate without fear of the trust and its stifling license requirements. The number of companies making movies explo

Quidsi’s fulfillment centers, designed by former Boeing operations manager Scott Hilton, used software to match every order with the smallest possible shipping box (there were twenty-three sizes available), minimizing excess weight and thus reducing the per-order shipping cost. (Amazon, which had to match box sizes to a much larger selection of pro

Bezos enforced strict frugality in Amazon’s daily operations; he made employees pay for parking and required all executives to fly coach. But he was surprisingly profligate in some ways. In early 1998, when he hired Randy Tinsley from Intel to become director of corporate development, one of the first things he said to him was “I am really looking

Young had become one of thousands of Americans—the New York Times would later put the number at 75,000—running businesses entirely on eBay. EBay had empowered her in just the way Omidyar had hoped when he created AuctionWeb. It enabled her to start a business in her own small town, selling to customers around the country and the world. It also gave