The Sure Thing (How Entrepreneurs Really Succeed) by Malcolm Gladwell
allianceofceos.com
allianceofceos.com
Only Gladwell could:
1. Be dazzled by the innovation of something as ordinary as wage arbitrage, and yet
2. Think that opening a factory in a communist country is not an example of "risk taking".
Long after he became wealthy, he would take the bus to his offices in midtown, and the train out to his summer house on Long Island.
Surely a man of the people would take public transit to his mansion!
At the end of the day, most innovation has wage arbitraging as a major component of it when all is said and done.
I also thought the detail that he rode his bike around the Hamptons as a testament to his thrift was dubious. So someone who buys a house in the Hamptons is thrifty because he rides a bike? Could it be that he's biking as some sort of recreation perhaps? Big loss only driving the Lexus in a and out of the area.
He could be trying to impress someone. Maybe there's a bet involved. Maybe he's trying to affect bicycle sales.
People do things for many reasons. However, observers are really bad at figuring out said reasons.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error for some related discussion.
I think that the predator mindset is also key. If one is running scared with the herd and if one's hope is based on a vague notion or an outside chance, then one is the opposite of a predator. (The dot-com and Web 2.0 booms were full of groups with this mindset.) If one has an insight that others do not and prepared to execute on it, then one is like a predator stalking prey.
How does one study and internalize such a mindset? Is there a safe way to practice it?
Then again, perhaps it's a useful metaphor, in that ecological niches are not static. In the case of social news/networks, sites often started out quite small, then changed their ecological niche over time. In fact, one can argue that reddit.com, Digg, MySpace, Facebook all shifted in this way.
The pattern I see here, is that the ecological niche viewpoint is more strategic, whereas the predator/prey viewpoint is more tactical. When one is planning a site's entry into a certain market, one can choose a small niche that can be strategically grown into a larger one. When one is executing on that entry, look for a place where your understanding of the value proposition is better than those on the other side of your transaction. (Perhaps this is what Facebook's founder was thinking when he made that comment on people giving him their data.)
- Wildly under-capitalized
- Organize as a sole proprietorship rather than a corporation
- Don’t write a business plan
- Start from scratch
- Sell to consumers rather than businesses
- Under-emphasize marketing
- Don't understand financial controls
- Try to compete on price
These sound like they probably correlate with noobishness, as in by the time you know what you're doing you probably have more money available and are more familiar with complicated corporate structures (and more afraid of lawyers) and have been taught to like business plans.
> - Sell to consumers rather than businesses
"Ninety per cent of the fastest-growing companies in the country sell to other businesses; failed entrepreneurs usually try selling to consumers, and, rather than serving customers that other businesses have missed, they chase the same people as their competitors do."
Most failed new businesses try selling to consumers; but how does this compare the the fraction of all new businesses that try selling to consumers? Most fastest-growing businesses are in B2B; is the market growing or are they cannibalizing their competitors?
> - Don't understand financial controls
Does this mean budgeting and such?
> - Under-emphasize marketing > - Try to compete on price
These sound reasonable, in that I wouldn't expect them to be confounded by being a strong demographic selector like the first items.
Someone who can: please fix the title, per the guidelines.
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