25iq

My views on the market, tech, and everything else

What Killed Post-Break Up AT&T? What Lessons can be Learned from this Titanic Modern Failure?

  While it is impossible to say that any one event started the process that resulted in the breakup of  AT&T, one important personality who was involved was “Jack the Giant Killer” Goeken.  He was the founder of many businesses including the long-distance provider MCI, two air-to-ground communications providers and the communications system used by FTD florists. The Washington Post wrote about him: “Beneath Mr. Goeken’s frumpy appearance — he […]

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A Dozen Lessons about Business from Anthony Bourdain

  “The absolute certainty that nobody was going to care about, read or buy Kitchen Confidential was what allowed me to write it. I didn’t have to think about what people expected. I didn’t care. As a result I was able to write the book, quickly and without tormenting myself. That was in many ways a very liberating place to be. I’ve kind of tried to stick with that business […]

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A Half Dozen Lessons about the Right Burn Rate (Post Product/Market Fit in a Connected World)

Mark Suster, Fred Wilson, Tomasz Tunguz and Danielle Morrill have written blog posts on burn rates. These posts and others are linked to in the Notes to this blog post as is usual. This post will focus on the optimal burn rate after product/market fit has been proven by a business. In other words, the assumption in the discussion that follows is that the value hypothesis has been proven and […]

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A Half Dozen Lessons About Writing and Getting a Book Published

“To write what is worth publishing, to find honest people to publish it, and get sensible people to read it, are the three great difficulties in being an author.” Charles Caleb Colton (1780 – 1832)  Write a book proposal first. I have now written and found a publisher for seven books. Most of them are listed on my Amazon author page. I have learned a fair amount during that process, which […]

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A Dozen Lessons from Murray Gell-Mann that Apply to Business, Investing and Life

  Murray Gell-Mann is a theoretical physicist and was the winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1969 for his work on the classification of subatomic particles. Gell-Mann is a Professor of Theoretical Physics, Emeritus at Caltech and a Distinguished Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, which he co-founded in 1993. Caltech writes: “Gell-Man earned his PhD in physics at MIT and went on to study at Princeton under […]

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A Dozen Lessons about Business and Life from Jimmy Iovine

  Jimmy Iovine started his career as a sound engineer. He used that experience to become a record producer and later translated that set of skills to becoming a co-founder of Interscope Records. In 2006, Iovine and Dr. Dre founded Beats Electronics, which they later sold to Apple for $3 billion. As an aside, I would have liked to have written about Dr. Dre too in his post, but he […]

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A Dozen Lessons about Investing and Money from Dan Ariely

Dan  is a Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University and the founder of the Center for Advanced Hindsight. His research and work is about  how people actually act in the marketplace, as opposed to how they should or would perform if they were completely rational. His books include Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, The Honest Truth about Dishonesty, and Payoff. His next book is entitled: Dollars […]

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A Dozen Attributes of a Scalable Business

“A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup. Nor is it necessary for a startup to work on technology, or take venture funding, or have some sort of ‘exit.’ The only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with startups follows from growth. To grow rapidly, you need to make something you can sell to a […]

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What Would a Healthy Music Streaming Business (e.g., Spotify, SoundCloud, Pandora) Look Like?

SoundCloud was just recapitalized by investors in a dramatic down round after announcing that the company had only enough cash to last into the fourth quarter. Pandora just agreed to terms on a new investment that was also a down round and which resulted in a new controlling investor. Both companies have a new CEO. More broadly, there are bitter fights in the value chain between music streamers and music […]

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A Dozen Lessons about Product and Services Pricing (Including being “Too Hungry to Eat”)

This is a blog post about some of the most basic elements of pricing a product or service. Since the longest a post like this should be is about 3,500 words, the scope of what is covered here must be significantly narrowed. This discussion therefore focuses mostly on the sale of a single product or service and on the right price point. Decisions get more complex when there are multiple […]

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