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Most problems would benefit from a paper and pencil and a room to yourself rather than a large disruptive meeting. Big ideas require big brainstorming, and small ideas just take some self-reflection.
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To all my friends still at @HTC - just quit. leave now. it’s tough to do, but you’ll be so much happier, I swear.
Eric Lin, former Product Strategy Manager at HTC
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We are not a generic “video” company that streams all types of video such as news, usergenerated, sports, music video, or reality. We are movies and TV shows.
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Interestingly, all of this is only possible because Google was behind it. Any startup could have come up with a similar concept, but the product would lack the integration that Now has. Because Google likely manages quite a bit of your life, whether it’s your email, calendar, bus route, or school papers, they can extract information from each of these individual services to piece together a picture of your life you didn’t even know existed.
Google reportedly launching paid YouTube subscriptions this week
By Matt Brian, theverge.comGoogle is set to introduce new paid subscriptions for specialist video channels on YouTube, as it looks to move beyond its main advertising revenue stream and deliver a wider range of content. According to the Financial Times,…
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It’s easier to tell good design from bad when you’re not looking at current fashions. (Try looking at the haircuts in an old high school yearbook.)
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I saw Bill Gurley say that you can only make money by being right about something that most people think is wrong. His logic was that you can’t make money by being wrong. And you can’t make money by being right about something everyone else knows. So you have to be right about something that most people think is wrong. I really like that framework.
Fred Wilson, [Return and Ridicule](http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2013/04/return-and-ridicule.html)
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Charlie and I avoid businesses whose futures we can’t evaluate, no matter how exciting their products may be. In the past, it required no brilliance for people to foresee the fabulous growth that awaited such industries as autos (in 1910), aircraft (in 1930) and television sets (in 1950). But the future then also included competitive dynamics that would decimate almost all of the companies entering those industries. Even the survivors tended to come away bleeding.
Just because Charlie and I can clearly see dramatic growth ahead for an industry does not mean we can judge what its profit margins and returns on capital will be as a host of competitors battle for supremacy. At Berkshire we will stick with businesses whose profit picture for decades to come seems reasonably predictable. Even then, we will make plenty of mistakes.
Warren Buffet, 2009 Berkshire Hathaway annual letter, via http://dcurt.is/bleeding-survivors
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- Read obituaries. They are just like biographies, only shorter. They remind us that interesting, successful people rarely lead orderly, linear lives.
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There is no AWS-equivalent for hardware. To get manufacturing right, entrepreneurs often end up living in China for months and even years.
