Weekly Reading 1/10
And the Money Comes Rolling In
“Frind has few friends in business, no mentors, and no investors. Moreover, he has taken a path that seems at odds with the conventional wisdom about Internet companies. Most websites with as much traffic as Plenty of Fish would have by this point raised millions of dollars from venture capitalists, hired dozens of engineers and business-development types, and figured out a way to keep someone as unconventional as Markus Frind from making any major decisions.”
Twitter and the Relational Field
“It’s my sense that a primary (and not yet discussed) reason why twitter has grown so quickly and produced so many loyal participants is that it provides the closest we have seen yet to an optimal relational field among the online social networks.”
“The key is to know to look for it– to realize that having an idea for a startup is not like having an idea for a class project. The goal in a startup is not to write a cool piece of software. It’s to make something people want. And to do that you have to look at users– forget about hacking, and just look at users.”
On 2008 (A Toxic ‘Eureka!’ Moment?)
“The illness includes them all, parts of an incredible whole. And the only label that fits is that inside handshake description – what we know from one to another, but can never clearly explain: We’re Americans, goddamnit… Consuming’s what we do.”
“The best-selling MP3 album at Amazon in 2008 was Nine Inch Nails’ Ghosts I-IV, which was released free under a Creative Commons license. The album made more than $1.6 million in revenue for NIN in its first week, and hitting #1 on Billboard’s Electronic charts, Last.fm has the album ranked as the 4th-most-listened to album of the year, with over 5,222,525 scrobbles.”
“But here’s my final and perhaps most important lesson: do what works. It’s that simple. Tools, even lean tools, are just tools. Leadership requires people. At American Apparel there are no cheesy signs with “Teamwork” and “Challenge” on them. There are no glitzy glass lobbies. There is no sign of lean manufacturing in the traditional sense, and they don’t profess to be lean. No heavy lean training of employees, no overwhelming visual controls besides the metrics charts at the cells, no Shingo Prizes or Baldrige Awards.”
