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December 5 - December 15, 2020
“Drive like there’s a full cup of coffee on the dashboard,” I’ve heard Reed tell him.
Drive
Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia can’t afford their San Francisco rent, then realize that they can blow up an air mattress and charge people to sleep on it – that’s Airbnb. Travis Kalanick spends $800 on a private driver on New Year’s Eve and thinks there has to be a cheaper way – that’s Uber.
On airbnb & uber
The truth is that for every good idea, there are a thousand bad ones. And sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference.
Bad & good ideas
The best ideas rarely come on a mountaintop in a flash of lightning. They don’t even come to you on the side of a mountain, when you’re stuck in traffic behind a sand truck. They make themselves apparent more slowly, gradually, over weeks and months. And in fact, when you finally have one, you might not realize it for a long time.
“Sure. But you want something that will scale,” he said. “You want to sell something where the effort it takes to sell a dozen is identical to the effort it takes to sell just one. And while you’re at it, try and find something that’s more than just a onetime sale, so that once you’ve found a customer, you’ll be able to sell to them over and over again.” I
What to sell
The truth is, I like headaches. I like a problem in front of me every day, something to chew on. Something to solve.
The truth is that no business plan survives a collision with a real customer. So the trick is to take your idea and set it on a collision course with reality as soon as possible.
On business plans
If you stood in the first Netflix office sometime in the fall of 1997, you would have seen a room that resembled some unholy cross between a computer geek’s basement and a politician’s on-the-road campaign war center. And that’s just the way we liked it.
First office
Culture isn’t what you say. It’s what you do.
Culture
Your job as a leader is to let them figure that out. You’ve presumably chosen this group for such an arduous off-trail trip because you trust their judgment, and because they understand their job. So as a leader, the best way to ensure that everyone arrives at the campsite is to tell them where to go, not how to get there. Give them clear coordinates and let them figure it out. It’s the same at a startup. Real innovation comes not from top-down pronouncements and narrowly defined tasks. It comes from hiring innovators focused on the big picture who can orient themselves within a problem and
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On leading
What they really want is freedom and responsibility. They want to be loosely coupled but tightly aligned.
People
Silicon Valley brainstorming sessions often begin with someone saying, “There are no bad ideas.” I’ve always disagreed. There are bad ideas. But you don’t know an idea is bad until you’ve tried it.
Bad ideas
Focus. It’s an entrepreneur’s secret weapon. Again and again in the Netflix story – dropping DVD sales, dropping à la carte rentals, and eventually dropping many members of the original Netflix team – we had to be willing to abandon parts of the past in service of the future. Sometimes, focus this intense looks like ruthlessness – and it is, a little bit. But it’s more than that. It’s something akin to courage.
On moving on from the past
