As in architecture adding complex operational or marketing processes is pricy. Frank Gehry, an architect, said about building complex structures: flat costs $1, one curve $2, double curve $10.
Category: startup
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Framing startup philosophy 2
View technology as a means to improve things rather than an explicit replacement for X, although it definitely could be a replacement in the future. Don’t build a disruptive business. Disruption attracts attention. Build a business which can live happily in a competitive market and be seen as offering complementary service.
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Framing startup philosophy
Technology allows you to be a lot more exhaustive, consistent and unbiased. Every new business needs to think of itself as primarily a tech business.
Now every idea seems to be around Uber of X or Stripe of Y. Not long ago it was all about Facebook of Z. What’s next?
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Bezos on decision making
From the letter to Amazon shareholders:
There are some subtle traps that even high-performing large organizations can fall into as a matter of course, and we’ll have to learn as an institution how to guard against them. One common pitfall for large organizations – one that hurts speed and inventiveness – is “one-size-fits-all” decision making.
Some decisions are consequential and irreversible or nearly irreversible – one-way doors – and these decisions must be made methodically, carefully, slowly, with great deliberation and consultation. If you walk through and don’t like what you see on the other side, you can’t get back to where you were before. We can call these Type 1 decisions. But most decisions aren’t like that – they are changeable, reversible – they’re two-way doors. If you’ve made a suboptimal Type 2 decision, you don’t have to live with the consequences for that long. You can reopen the door and go back through. Type 2 decisions can and should be made quickly by high judgment individuals or small groups.
As organizations get larger, there seems to be a tendency to use the heavy-weight Type 1 decision-making process on most decisions, including many Type 2 decisions. The end result of this is slowness, unthoughtful risk aversion, failure to experiment sufficiently, and consequently diminished invention.1 We’ll have to figure out how to fight that tendency.
Uberpreneurship, a discipline with the best of all worlds: salary of a stable job, autonomy of an entrepreneur, relationships of an executive and feedback of a focus group.