The formulas for giant companies are the same | Hacker News Reader

The formulas for giant companies are the same

2 pointsskowmunk4 comments

Its amusing, amazing, surprising, but the general bunch of formulas used to build giant companies, monopolies and the sort have remained the same over more than a century.

The formulas used by the Gateses, Ellisons, Sergeys & Brins are more or less the same as the formulas used by the Venderbilts, Rockerfellers, Carnegies, Morgans...

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Was there a link missing in this story? Otherwise, it's rather unsubstantiated. :)

Its just the thoughts of an armchair analyst who likes browsing through history now and then, not an article.

and what are these formulas?

To be honest, I didn't study them as much as I would like to, tengo no tiempo amigo. :)

But with the very little bit of reading I did about them, this is the pattern I noticed:

(Obviously what I have put down here is a highly simplified version)

1) Breach the market with a cash cow

2) Keep using that cash to keep acquiring/developing other potential assets - aggressively

3) Keep integrating the acquired/developed assets into the cash generation models as soon as you can or/and Keep integrating the acquired/developed assets into the business model to channel or keep channeling as many existing and potential customers to your existing cash cow/s

4) Keep repeating 2 and 3 as much and as often as you can, because the day you stop, you stop growing and the lesser is your ability to defend your turf

5) Keep eating competition before they become a competition. (lot more capital efficient)

But this formula/strategy is something most of us mortals can't even implement successfully even if given. Because this formula/strategy is just half the story of those giants(companies). The other half of the story are those intellectual giants - the people behind these giant companies.

To really implement this strategy to make a company into a giant, i would think this would be a hyper shortened and simplified list of characteristics somebody would need to have:

1) an insatiable hunger for information and knowledge

2) the ability to put that information and knowledge into patterns constantly

3) the ability to see the value of seemingly useless (to others) information

4) the ability to build incredibly complex strategies that are immensely vast in breadth and depth and may reach out to a few years if not decades into the future

5) The ability to keep stable, build or modify those strategies using information that is constantly flowing in.

6) the ability and guts to not follow the crowd when required

7) capability to be hyper-vigilant of the center AND peripheries of the market/technological/strategic boundaries

8) a huge appetite for highly educated massive risks (not at all for the impulsive type)

I am sure these, if at all they do, represent a tiny fraction of the dimensions those intellectual giants operated upon.

Good luck.

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