Phil Knight famously turned the startup Blue Ribbon Sports into the giant company known as Nike. Knight described the market at the time he started his business in this way: “The American shoes were offshoots of tire companies. Shoes cost $5 and you would come back from a five-mile run with your feet bleeding. Then the German companies came in with $30 shoes, which were more comfortable.” During a trip to […]
As you know, Rovco has traditionally sold delicious bass on a transactional basis to its “Super Bass-o-Matic” customers. Spokesman: How many times has this happened to you? You have a bass, and you’re trying to find an exciting new way to prepare it for the dinner table. You could scale the bass, remove the bass’ tail, head and bones, and serve the fish as you would any other fish dinner. But […]
George “Buddy” Guy (BG) was born in 1936 in Louisiana. His earliest influences included T-Bone Walker, Lightnin’ Slim and Lightnin’ Hopkins. BG wrote in his autobiography: “I wanted to play like B.B. King but act like Guitar Slim.” In 1957, BG cut a demo tape at a Louisiana radio station and bought a one-way train ticket to Chicago. Eric Clapton has said that BG is “by far without a doubt the best guitar player alive.” […]
Why am I writing about Sammy Hagar? The answer is simple: because he has been a very successful business founder in addition to being a rock and roll star. To become an effective learning machine you will benefit from acquiring knowledge from as many sources as possible, including unconventional sources. For this same reason I have written blog posts on people like Rza, Wheezy, Kanye, Jimmy Iovine, and Biggie Smalls. Last, but not […]
Businesses are now selling subscriptions for software as a service (SaaS), but also for products like car washes and movies. Having a more predictable recurring revenue stream is often cited as a benefit of a subscription business model. If you look deeper there are more important benefits of an ongoing subscription relationship with customers that can also produce significantly higher return on investment, but only if the right conditions […]
If you have not at least watched the movie version of The Princess Bride, I suggest that you review your priorities in life. “The Princess Bride was directed by Rob Reiner, who was in the midst of a dynamite run that also included This Is Spinal Tap, The Sure Thing, Stand By Me, When Harry Met Sally, Misery and A Few Good Men; and written by William Goldman, who also wrote the book on which it was […]
Norman Augustine has a reputation for saying exactly what he means. When he says something like: “If stock market experts were so expert, they would be buying stock, not selling advice,” he transforms an obvious point into a humorous barb. As another example of his wit, he recently said: “We’ve all heard the criticism ‘He talks too much.’ When was the last time you heard someone criticized for listening […]
Benoit Mandelbrot was a Polish-born, French and American “mathematician with broad interests in the practical sciences.” I met him only once at a lecture at Microsoft Research before he passed away in 2010. Mandelbrot and Richard Hudson are the authors of the influential book The Misbehavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Financial Turbulence. I suggest you read this book for yourself (even though it is not an easy […]
The part of The Dude in 1998 Coen Brothers’ film The Big Lebowski is played by Jeff Bridges. The movie is so popular that it became the inspiration for Dudeism, which has been called “a religion, philosophy, or lifestyle.” The entry for Dudeism in Wikipedia describes it as: “essentially a modernized form of Taoism stripped of all of its metaphysical and medical doctrines.” In December of 2014 The Big […]
Katrina Lake is the founder and CEO of Stitch Fix. The magnitude of what she accomplished in building this business is highly underappreciated: She took a clothing retailer public in November 2017. This is a remarkable accomplishment given the financial state of retail in the United States and the challenges facing Nordstrom, Macy’s and others. Lake did so by finding sustainable competitive advantage using some of the most advanced technology in the […]