A business exists to create value in the form of a product or service – anon
If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product – Andrew Lewis
Why I’m thrilled Mark Zuckerberg is annoying the bankers – Jim Kerstetter, May 2012
Quelle horreur! It’s not often you find yourself cheering for a guy who is going to become a billionaire before his 30th birthday, but let’s face it: Zuckerberg is living the American dream; building a company from scratch, creating more than 3,500 good jobs so far, and getting rich because of it. Isn’t that what entrepreneurs are supposed to do? …let’s not take this whole “Wall Street is the engine of the economy and should be paid its due respect” thing too far. Without getting into the hard-to-pin-blame real estate disaster of the last decade, we can say the financial sector has shed 459,400 jobs over the last four years, according to a recent analysis of Labor Department statistics.
Why Group is poised for collapse – Rocky Agrawal, Venturebeat, Mar 2012
Well for starters, it’s not a coupon company nor a marketing company. At its core, Groupon’s U.S. business is a receivables factoring business. They give loans to small businesses at a very steep rate (the price of the discount plus Groupon’s commission). They get the money to fund these loans from credit card companies such as Chase Paymentech. Groupon is essentially a sub-prime lender that does zero risk assessment. And as word continues to spread about what a terrible deal running a Groupon is for many categories of businesses, the ones that will choose to run Groupons are the ones that are the most desperate. (increasing rate of refunds having to be paid back for failed Groupon offers)
What is a business model? – Greg Satell, Mar 2012
In essence, a business model is an idea about why people will pay more than it costs you to produce a product or service. Most business models are run of the mill, like a deli owner who simply believes that people will pay extra for someone to make their lunch for them, but others as truly innovative.
(e.g. Google – started out with a search engine and no idea how to monetise. Wasn’t just the deployment of ads around search results in a cleaner format – text only and short. The innovation was creating an automated auction of keywords, click to pay, to automatically place ads.)
The Incredible Shrinking Boomer Economy – Dave Cohen, Aug 2009
When 79 million people—nearly a third of Americans—start spending less and saving more, you know it won’t be pretty. According to consulting firm McKinsey, boomers’ conversion to thrift could stifle the economy’s hoped-for rebound and knock U.S. growth down from the 3.2% it has averaged since 1965 to 2.4% over the next 30 years. “We would have gotten here in 5 or 10 years as boomers retire, but [the economic crisis] pushed it up,” says Michael Sinoway, managing director of consulting firm AlixPartners. “Now [companies] are scared things won’t come back”…
How one CEO Facebook’d his company – David Kirkpatrick, Jun 2008
“I told all the employees it’s OK on a Friday for everybody to goof off and spend an hour or two on Facebook… ‘Go nuts! I dare you to participate… The subversive message was ‘Guys – the world is a different place and if we’re going to stay relevant we’re going to have to wake up’” – Jeremy Burton, Serena Software
Gilberto Gil, Minister of Culture for Brazil – talking at Google Zeitgeist, May 2008
The 21st century technologies represent a huge challenge to regulations. The revolution generated by the convergence of digital technologies obliges us to reinvent the way we do almost everything. I believe that anybody with public responsibility should look into the digital distribution of Intellectual Property as the most direct and powerful way of democratizing knowledge in the history of mankind. But instead we see almost every formal institution insisting on bluntly calling the digital distribution “Piracy”.
Larry Page on how to change the world – Andy Serwer, Fortune, Apr 2008
If you ask an economist what’s driven economic growth, it’s been major advances in things that mattered – the mechanization of farming, mass manufacturing, things like that. The problem is, our society is not organized around doing that. Instead, it’s sort of like “We are captives of the world, and whatever happens, happens.” That’s not the case at all.
