Rohit Bhargava's Blog, page 18

The Secret of Startup Success Might Be Who Is Willing to Lose Money the Longest

Amazon, Spotify, Netflix, Uber … all dominant players in their industry. What if the secret to their success is just that they were all willing to lose money for longer than any of their competitors? An article I read this week suggested that perhaps the ten year journeys of both Netflix and Hulu to now finally become profitable was largely due to their leadership’s willingness to keep losing money until eventually they would make it back. This was famously the strategy behind Jeff Bezos launchi...

The Non-Obvious Book of the Week: How To Winter by Dr. Kari Leibowitz

February is notorious for being the toughest month of the year for many people. In the Northern hemisphere, these are the cold winter months where social isolation feels at its highest and depression sets in for many people. Whether this describes you these months or not, How to Winter is a book about how to overcome this mindset and find the positivity to lift your mood and “thrive on cold, dark or difficult days.”

To write this book, the author Kari Leibowitz traveled around the world ...

Is This the Age of the Obscured Brand Logo?

There was a longstanding joke among my agency friends about the type of feedback we would often get from corporate clients when presenting our creative work. It essentially boiled down to some version of “make the logo bigger.” Brand managers and CMOs alike have long equated a prominent logo with brand building and, by extension, effective marketing. Lately, there are signs this may be shifting.

Marketing publication The Drum recently reported on brands who are “confidently disguising their l...

The Super Bowl Halftime Show Went Over Many People’s Heads. Here’s What It Meant …

Recently it seems like stories about social media often center on the negative impact of various platforms making it easy to spread misinformation, fuel hate or generally inspire an ever-present sense of insecurity about ourselves. This week I was reminded of one of the upsides of social media … the ability to share perspectives worth spreading.

The Super Bowl halftime was a hot topic for online discussion. Most of it centered around whether you “got it” or not. The show had lots of cultural ...

Are Book Blurbs Worth the Effort or a Tradition That “Rewards Connections Over Talent”?

By any measure, I’ve been pretty successful at getting book blurbs across my ten published books. Deepak Chopra. Tony Robbins. Adam Grant. They have all done book blurbs for me in the past and with my last book Non-Obvious Thinking, we went out big on blurbs—collecting more than 50 of them from a collection of visionary authors, business leaders, innovators. It was time consuming, humbling and according to a new article from this week’s NY Times, maybe a total waste of time.

According to ...

The Intrigue and Lessons of Canceled TV Shows and Abandoned Pilots

I find the idea of canceled TV programs to be intriguing. I always have. It’s not that I enjoy reading about the creative misfortune of people having their ideas crushed after a depressingly small window of time to prove themselves “worthy.” The process to even get a show concept green lit, filmed, edited and then aired is so difficult that I can’t help wondering what happens to those ideas after they get killed?

The world of TV is filled with accidental success stories (fans hated the first ...

The Non-Obvious Book of the Week: Negotiating While Black by Damali Peterman

If you are an avid follower of our Non-Obvious Book Awards program, you might recognize this week’s selection: Negotiating While Black. It was our pick for the Most Useful book of the year in 2024 for a few key reasons. Firstly, while the book’s title might indicate you’ll need to be Black in order to read it—the beautiful thing about how its written is that the book is most useful for anyone who finds themselves in a negotiating situation where they may be underestimated. That’s most of us rega...

Poopy Diapers and How to Destroy a Small Business with Minimal Effort

Paul and Rachelle Baron sell washable swim diapers on Amazon. Like many other small businesses, they use the logistics arm of Amazon to provide distribution and fulfillment for them as consumers can buy their products on Amazon without ever knowing they are a third-party seller. Orders still arrive in 1-2 days and consumers are happy. And of course, Amazon makes it super easy to return items … which created a messy problem for the Barons when one consumer decided to return a used swim diaper cov...

What The AI-Enhanced Beatles Grammy Award Win Tells Us About the Future of Memories

In case you missed it, at this past weekend’s Grammy Awards, the Beatles took home the win for Best Rock Performance for the AI-assisted track “Now and Then.” Before you go down the rabbit hole of seeing this as the first step in the music apocalypse, it’s important to note exactly what was done here. This was not a new track created by AI trained on all the past recordings of the Beatles. Rather, it was an effort to use AI tools to clean up a decades-old muffled track of an original recording f...

Bad Bunny Celebrates Puerto Rico and His Heritage by Creating Exclusive Experience

The first nine shows of Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny’s upcoming summer tour are sold out. That’s not particularly surprising. The interesting thing about them is that they all happen in Puerto Rico and tickets were only available to Puerto Rico residents through in-person sales (to prevent scalpers from getting tickets as much as possible). Obviously there will still be some reselling going on, but the commitment to his hometown is captured in the title of his tour itself “No me quiero ir d...