Sixian

Oral histories, like publications, bind people. After a conversation, all parties maintain ownership of what transpired, and they continue to hold ties to one another.

We often think making things for the web is a process of simplifying—the hub, the dashboard, the control panel are all dreams of technology that coalesces, but things have a tendency to diverge into a multiplicity of options. We pile on more tools and technology, each one increasingly nuanced and minor in its critical differences. Clearly,... See more

You bought an album, it was a bundled product. Back in the days, singles weren't even a big part of the business. So, you had to buy 12, 15 songs from an artist in an album format. You had to pay upfront for the perpetual use of that and every incremental piece of music you bought cost you money. You had to have this high threshold for wanting to... See more

“It’s sort of like: ‘What do you want to be in life?’”, Thiel tells me. “And the answer, more often than not, is ‘I want to be an entrepreneur.’”

On the other side, the millions of smaller vendors, EGMs solve the challenge of selling into large corporations. 

1. Executive sponsors: senior people with decision-making ability.2. Legal, compliance, procurement, and security: gatekeepers. You need to earn their trust before an enterprise will onboard to your platform.3. Employee users: Your product has to be user-friendly and provide a lot of value to end-user employees, especially as SaaS adoption... See more

Data's becoming a hugely important aspect of this business. Again, an individual can tie into data streams from various outlets, be it social media, be it streaming, but the ability to capture a full picture, looking at the physical, looking at the global data, looking at every outlet, again, when I have 39, 40% market share in a market, I get data... See more

The positive thing is that once you solve the first and second sale for one large corporation, you often have enough demand to solve the chicken-or-egg problem and attract supply because the company should represent 100’s or 1,000’s or 10,000’s of buyers. This lets you methodically build toward critical mass and start benefiting from a network... See more