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Blake sold a small Box account to the Stanford Sleep Clinic, where researchers needed an easy, secure way to store experimental data logs. Today the university offers a Stanford-branded Box account to every one of its students and faculty members, and Stanford Hospital runs on Box. If it had started off by trying to sell the president of the university on an enterprise-wide solution, Box would have sold nothing. A complex sales approach would have made Box a forgotten startup failure; instead, personal sales made it a multibillion-dollar business.
A product is viral if its core functionality encourages users to invite their friends to become users too.
poor sales rather than bad product is the most common cause of failure.
computers are complements for humans, not substitutes.
The most valuable businesses of coming decades will be built by entrepreneurs who seek to empower people rather than try to make them obsolete.
computers are not just more or less powerful than each other—they’re categorically different.
Properly understood, technology is the one way for us to escape competition in a globalizing world.
This kind of man-machine symbiosis enabled PayPal to stay in business,
if humans and computers together could achieve dramatically better results than either could attain alone, what other valuable businesses could be built on this core principle?
Better technology in law, medicine, and education won’t replace professionals; it will allow them to do even more.
mistakenly believing that more data always creates more value.
big data is usually dumb data. 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. Actionable insights can only come from a human analyst (or the kind of generalized artificial intelligence that exists only in science fiction).
We’re impressed with small feats accomplished by computers alone, but we ignore big achievements from complementarity because the human contribution makes them less uncanny.
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?
Most cleantech companies crashed because they neglected one or more of the seven questions that every business must answer: 1. The Engineering Question Can you create breakthrough technology instead of incremental improvements? 2. The Timing Question Is now the right time to start your particular business? 3. The Monopoly Question Are you starting with a big share of a small market? 4. The People Question Do you have the right team? 5. The Distribution Question Do you have a way to not just create but deliver your product? 6. The Durability Question Will your market position be defensible 10
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Better Place thought its technology spoke for itself, so they didn’t bother to market it clearly.
was competition from Chinese manufacturers really impossible to predict? Cleantech entrepreneurs would have done well to rephrase the durability question and ask: what will stop China from wiping out my business? Without an answer, the result shouldn’t have come as a surprise.
Each of the casualties had described their bright futures using broad conventions on which everybody agreed. Great companies have secrets: specific reasons for success that other people don’t see.
Social entrepreneurs aim to combine the best of both worlds and “do well by doing good.” Usually they end up doing neither.
While generic cleantech companies struggled to differentiate themselves, Tesla built a unique brand around the secret that cleantech was even more of a social phenomenon than an environmental imperative.
no matter how much the world needs energy, only a firm that offers a superior solution for a specific energy problem can make money.
Jobs’s return to Apple 12 years later shows how the most important task in business—the creation of new value—cannot be reduced to a formula and applied by professionals.
Above all, don’t overestimate your own power as an individual. Founders are important not because they are the only ones whose work has value, but rather because a great founder can bring out the best work from everybody at his company.
In this respect Rand was a merely half-great writer: her villains were real, but her heroes were fake.
