More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Our reader was not designed to be the easiest reader on the market to use; it was designed to be the coolest thing you ever saw.
We built our software, sign-up, underwriting, and a dozen other systems with the idea that the customer experience
would be so simple that occasional email support would suffice.
it was possible to have millions of happy customers with whom you never spoke.
To provide a good live customer service experience takes months of planning, hiring, and training, not to mention finding a place for everyone to sit.
Board meetings at Square are usually fun. But the day we discussed Amazon, the mood was as somber as an oncologist’s waiting room.
This programmer was just a normal, decent Java developer, and our offer was $100,000 in annual salary and another $100,000 in stock vesting over four years. This was before we ever went public, so our stock was not tradable. This large tech platform made a counteroffer to keep their employee right where he was: it was $8 million.
Find an established market and copy what someone else is already doing. Now all you need to do is carve out a bit of the existing market for your new company, maybe add some small improvements that make your operation better: lower price, better product, closer location, faster shipping, or English-speaking customer service.
Every living thing is a copy of something else and can usually copy itself. Every bug, bacterium, and blue whale began as a copy of some similar parent. We may not know how life began, but we sure know how life continues: replication. We are born from copying and born to copy.
even though the PhD dissertation is supposed to be original work, the form of this original work should be copied from other successful dissertations.
“Every time I showed the students an example of original thinking, they just copied the example.
Copying is so wired into our brains and institutions that as soon as we stop copying we feel uncomfortable.
Of course, if you never do anything but copy, society will embrace you. Conversely, if you reject the proven way, society may reject you.
Anger is a crazy energy source, like a tank of gasoline.
I wrote my first textbook when I was eighteen years old, driven by a full tank of anger. It was the fall of 1983, and I was a freshman studying economics at Washington University.
none of the programming examples worked. Some of the sample programs were simply wrong,
The only thing about that book that functioned properly was the 15 percent royalty payment the author received on each copy.
By the start of my sophomore year, I had produced a book that was exactly what I would have wanted as a freshman CS student. Perhaps because the book was
Word spread around campus about how this freshman kid had written a textbook, and I acquired a completely undeserved reputation as someone who knew computers.
He had nobody to copy, but his actions changed the world.*
Innovation Stacks are rare, but when they do occur they create organizations with massive impact and longevity.
a naked man swimming a river to buy some almonds makes perfect sense to me.
But banking in 1901 was not like banking today. The banks ignored small businesses, forcing desperate people into the hands of loan sharks or out of business entirely. A.P.
1906, the hand of fate threw A.P. and everyone in his family out of bed. The Great San Francisco Earthquake was strong enough
They loaded the bank’s gold and records onto the carts and then hid the treasure under the vegetables to disguise it from the looters.
While the other banks froze in fear, A.P. and the Bank of Italy went down to the wharf with a bag of gold and a ledger book. He began lending money to anyone who wanted to rebuild San Francisco.
THE INNOVATION STACK that the Bank of Italy built has an uncanny resemblance to what we created at Square a century later. We created innovation to make the system easier to use and accessible to everyone.
An entrepreneur’s audacity and perseverance can eventually dominate an industry so totally that the battle grows quiet again.
a seventeen-year-old Swedish boy named Ingvar Kamprad
he copied his competition.
Consumer protection was poorly developed, and it was easy to cheat.
“New problems created a dizzying chance.
When we were not allowed to buy the same furniture that others were, we were forced to design our own, and that came to provide us with a style of our own, a design of our own.
how innovation can transform even the most undramatic industry in the world.
how profitable is unknown since IKEA is a private company.*
Central Time Zone had been renamed “Herb Time.”
The Wright brothers themselves could not make money in the sky despite having a worldwide monopoly on airplanes. A look at balance sheets from 1903 to yesterday might make you think people weren’t meant to go hurtling through the air.
