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The best thing I did as a manager at PayPal was to make every person in the company responsible for doing just one thing. Every employee’s one thing was unique, and everyone knew I would evaluate him only on that one thing.
Internal conflict is like an autoimmune disease: the technical cause of death may be pneumonia, but the real cause remains hidden from plain view.
People at a successful startup are fanatically right about something those outside it have missed.
It’s easy to resist the most obvious sales pitches, so we entertain a false confidence in our own independence of mind.
Sales is the opposite: an orchestrated campaign to change surface appearances without changing the underlying reality.
All salesmen are actors: their priority is persuasion, not sincerity.
People who sell advertising are called “account executives.” People who sell customers work in “business development.” People who sell companies are “investment bankers.” And people who sell themselves are called “politicians.”
Economists attribute this to “path dependence”: specific historical circumstances independent of objective quality can determine which products enjoy widespread adoption.
If you’ve invented something new but you haven’t invented an effective way to sell it, you have a bad business—no matter how good the product.
Superior sales and distribution by itself can create a monopoly, even with no product differentiation. The converse is not true.
No matter how strong your product—even if it easily fits into already established habits and anybody who tries it likes it immediately—you must still support it with a strong distribution plan.
Good enterprise sales strategy starts small, as it must: a new customer might agree to become your biggest customer, but they’ll rarely be comfortable signing a deal completely out of scale with what you’ve sold before.
But making personal sales to doctors doesn’t just bring in revenue; by adding doctors to the network, salespeople make the product more valuable to consumers (and more consumer users increases its appeal to doctors).
Whoever is first to dominate the most important segment of a market with viral potential will be the last mover in the whole market.
While American consumers have benefited from access to cheap toys and textiles from China, they’ve had to pay higher prices for the gasoline newly desired by millions of Chinese motorists.
The convergence of desire is even more obvious at the top: all oligarchs have the same taste in Cristal, from Petersburg to Pyongyang.
We’re less good at making sense of enormous amounts of data. Computers are exactly the opposite: they excel at efficient data processing, but they struggle to make basic judgments that would be simple for any human.
The stark differences between man and machine mean that gains from working with computers are much higher than gains from trade with other people.
As computers become more and more powerful, they won’t be substitutes for humans: they’ll be complements.
the computer would flag the most suspicious transactions on a well-designed user interface, and human operators would make the final judgment as to their legitimacy. Thanks
Computers can find patterns that elude humans, but they don’t know how to compare patterns from different sources or how to interpret complex behaviors.
But the most valuable companies in the future won’t ask what problems can be solved with computers alone. Instead, they’ll ask: how can computers help humans solve hard problems?
Companies must strive for 10x better because merely incremental improvements often end up meaning no improvement at all for the end user.
Customers won’t care about any particular technology unless it solves a particular problem in a superior way. And if you can’t monopolize a unique solution for a small market, you’ll be stuck with vicious competition.
But you can’t dominate a submarket if it’s fictional, and huge markets are highly competitive, not highly attainable.
They deluded themselves into believing that an overwhelming social need for alternative energy solutions implied an overwhelming business opportunity for cleantech companies of all kinds.
Cleantech companies faced the same problem: no matter how much the world needs energy, only a firm that offers a superior solution for a specific energy problem can make money.
But a valuable business must start by finding a niche and dominating a small market.
companies that create new technology often resemble feudal monarchies rather than organizations that are supposedly more “modern.”
The single greatest danger for a founder is to become so certain of his own myth that he loses his mind. But an equally insidious danger for every business is to lose all sense of myth and mistake disenchantment for wisdom.
