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November 10 - November 28, 2018
Alibaba In April 2016, a native online commerce company surpassed Walmart to become the world’s largest retailer.
485 billion in “gross merchandise value” (GMV)
Alibaba itself collects only a fraction of that in revenue—$15 billion in fiscal year 2016.
percent of packages that travel via Chinese post originate from an Alibaba business.
In sum, it’s never been a better time to be exceptional, or a worse time to be average.
The difference between good and great can be 10 percent or less, but the delta in rewards is closer to 10 times.
Excellence, grit, and empathy are timeless attributes of successful people in every field.
smart people who work hard and treat people well do better than people whose thinking is muddled, who are lazy, or who are unpleasant to colleagues.
How well someone manages their own enthusiasm through those cycles is important.
Young people who have a strong sense of their own identity, remain poised under stress, and learn and apply what they’ve learned, do better than peers who are more easily flustered, get hung up on petty issues, and let their emotions drive their responses to stimuli. People who are comfortable taking direction and giving it, and who understand their role in a group, do better than their peers when lines of authority get murky and organizational structures are fluid.
Daniel Goleman, who popularized the term emotional intelligence,
measurable business results at global companies led by individuals who demonstrate self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills.
emotional maturity is that among younger people, this s...
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There is neurological evidence that women’s brains develop sooner and more quickly into adult brains.
70 percent of high school valedictorians female, the future really is women.
we are expected to use and master tools that did not exist a decade ago, or even last year.
Curiosity is crucial to success.
the telephone took 75 years to reach 50 million users, whereas television was in 50 million households within 13 years, the internet in 4, . . . and Angry Birds in 35 days.
it took Microsoft Office 22 years to reach a billion users, but Gmail only 12, and Facebook 9.
Be the gal who comes up with practical and bat-shit crazy ideas worth discussing and trying.
ownership. Be more obsessed with the details than anybody on your team and what needs to get done, if, when, and how.
Be an owner, in every sense of the word—your task, your project, your business.
College grads make ten times more, over their lifetime, than people with just high school degrees.
The cost of college has skyrocketed in recent years, at a rate of 197 percent vs. the 1.37 percent inflation rate.1,2 Education is ripe for disruption.
The friends you make on campus can be just as valuable. Some of those friends will drop off the face of the earth, sure, but some of them will go on to acquire assets, or skills, or connections of their own that, properly networked, may be just what you need to succeed in your own future endeavors.
Get into a second- or even third-tier university . . . and then work your ass off: a great GPA, honors programs, awards, service clubs, etc. This is also a much cheaper route as well.
As only hired As, while Bs hired Cs—but he was right: winners recognize other winners, while also-rans can be threatened by competitors.
Competing takes grit.
We have learned how to manage young people (clear objectives, metrics, invest in them, empathy)
The Four are business; nothing is immune, and if you don’t get them, you (increasingly) don’t get business today.
Try to get equity as part of compensation (if you don’t think equity in your employer is going to be valuable, find a new employer).
The path to rich(es) is a path of living below your means and investing in income-producing assets. Rich is more a function of discipline than how much you make.
If you leave, keep in mind people remember more about how you leave than what you did while there. No matter the situation, be gracious.
Once a firm has momentum and access to capital, it is better served by a visionary who can turn this momentum into a somewhat dumbed-down, scalable, and repeatable process and gain access to cheaper and cheaper capital.
The operator is long on business maturity and reeks of integrity.
A productive exercise for one’s own career is to ask: Where do I thrive in the alphabet? Think of companies and products having a life cycle, A–Z. Are you happiest at start-ups where you’re expected to wear a number of different hats (A–D), the inception/visionary stage (E–H), good at managing, scaling,
Facebook and Google accounted for 90 percent of U.S. digital advertising revenue growth in 2016.
Kint, Jason. “Google and Facebook Devour the Ad and Data Pie. Scraps for Everyone Else.” Digital Content Next.
The traits of successful entrepreneurs haven’t changed much in the digital age: you need more builders than branders, and it’s key to have a technologist as part of, or near, the founding team. There are three tests or questions: 1. Are you comfortable with public failure? 2. Do you like to sell? 3. Do you lack the skills to work at a big firm?
99 percent will never risk their own capital for the pleasure of . . . working.
“Entrepreneur” is a synonym for “salesperson.” Selling people to join your firm, selling them to stay at your firm, selling investors, and (oh yeah) selling customers.
Selling is calling people who don’t want to hear from you, pretending to like them, getting treated poorly, and then calling them again.
The good news: if you like to sell and you’re good at it, you will always make more money, relative to how hard you work, than any of your colleagues, and . . . they will hate you for it.
Do you lack the skills to work at a big firm? Being successful in a big firm is not easy and requires a unique skill set. You have to play nice with others, suffer injustices and bullshit at every turn, and be politically savvy—get noticed by key stakeholders doing good work and garner executive-level sponsorship.
In a democratic society the existence of large centers of private power is dangerous to the continuing vitality of a free people. —Louis Brandeis
THE FOUR MANIFEST GOD, love, sex, and consumption and add value to billions of people’s lives each day. However, these firms are not concerned with the condition of our souls, and won’t hold our hands or take care of us in our old age.
