The late Dee Hock, founder of Visa, was a business legend in many respects. Like many of the most revered founders, his ideas were years ahead of their time, and his writing is clear, concise, and super interesting. He famously organized Visa around a decentralized management model, in an era when the norm was the extremely centralized, hierarchical structure. Companies like Amazon, Johnson and Johnson, Uber, Valve Software, and others have adopted the same principles Hock pioneered to make their companies more resilient in the face of challenge.
Geospatial analytics company Descartes Labs recently sold to private equity, in what former CEO Mark Johnson calls a “fire sale.” This post is his perspective on the nature of the business over time, their missteps along the way in both company identity and fundraising, and some of the shenanigans that can happen as stakeholders start to head for the exits.
Not knowing much about Descartes’ actual business, either the original vision of the product or its actual delivery over the years, I don’t have...
“Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.”
— Peter Drucker
People throw around these two words pretty indiscriminately in business, usually not making a distinction between them. They’re treated as interchangeable synonyms for broadly being “good” at something.
We can think about effectiveness and efficiency as two dimensions on a grid, often (but not always) in competition with one another. More focus on one means less on the other.
That Drucker quote is a pretty solid one-line distinction. But like many quotes, it’s concerned with being pithy and memorable, but not that helpful.
I enjoyed this interview with Stripe co-founder John Collison. The range of topics covered in this discussion is wild. Always impressive to see someone that’s been so objectively successful still maintain the level of curiosity he does, motivated to constantly fill knowledge gaps.
A sampling of the discussion topics:
Industrial conglomerates
Value of writing skill and clear internal communication
Fred Wilson with advice to startups on keeping things simple:
I have sat through numerous pitches where I am listening to the founder explain their technology and go to market plan and I think “this is going to be a reverse triple somersault with two twists in pike and there is no way they are going to land it…
So the better approach is to pick something simple to execute, nail it, then build on it with another relatively simple move, nail that too, and keep going.
One of the benefits of staying in bootstrapped mode is that...