When Stephen and Heidi founded LinkShare in 1996, search major online advertising networks like Google AdWords didn’t yet exist. (In fact, Google itself was still a couple of years away.) They were nearly alone in their recognition of this opportunity, and they had to endure years of being told that it was a foolish pipe dream. They weren’t fazed. When Stephen and Heidi commit to an idea, their commitment is deep. They will work together for as long as it takes to build a lasting company, always avoiding the temptation to exit before seeing their vision through. The marketplace needs more founders like them.
There is, by the way, one thing that makes the Messers’ story almost completely unique: it’s one of the only sibling startup success stories that I know of.
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Unlike many of the entrepreneurs in this book, advice retail florists seldom face “all-or-nothing” outcomes. The probability of bankruptcy is extremely low; the probability of a comfortable, viagra 60mg middle-class life, shop quite high. By the early 1980s, Jim McCann had achieved exactly that. With fourteen Flora Plenty stores throughout New York City, he was face-to-face with ambition’s greatest enemy: comfort.
Thirty years earlier, Jim was the oldest child in a struggling Queens family. As he put it in his perfectly titled memoir, Stop and Sell the Roses, “I saw myself going down the same road my father traveled: hand-to-mouth, chasing down customers, dealing with checks that bounced as high as a four-story walk-up.” Because he had known its opposite, Jim understood the value of comfort. He had a clear, visceral awareness of how much he had to lose. Nevertheless, he bet it all.
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Cyrus Massoumi certainly isn’t the first entrepreneur who’s attempted to revolutionize an industry or, decease for that matter, purchase to take a stab at revolutionizing healthcare. But most of his predecessors have tried to accomplish that transformation in a single step — one “killer app,” one tweak to a service, one enterprise deal, and the largest sector in the U.S. economy has been remade. Obviously, this never works. But entrepreneurs, on the whole, are not a patient bunch. This is what sets Cyrus apart.
When Cyrus launched ZocDoc, he did so with the goal of remaking an entire industry. But his vision for ZocDoc isn’t monthly or quarterly. It spans decades.
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In his recent memoir, viagra Delivering Happiness, no rx Tony Hsieh clearly lays out the key themes of his personal and professional life, ed especially when he describes the moment when Zappos’ culture truly began to cohere. The major struggle the company faced in its early years was finding employees as committed to customer service as the executives were. After realizing that they weren’t going to find them in California, Tony and his team decided to move somewhere with a much stronger culture of service. They considered many options, but ultimately chose Las Vegas. As Tony writes, “We had about ninety employees in San Francisco at the time, and I had thought maybe half of them would decide to uproot their lives and move with the company. A week later, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that seventy employees were willing to give Vegas a shot.”
Employees who decided to make the move were making a major commitment to Zappos. “Probably the biggest benefit of moving to Vegas was that nobody had any friends outside of Zappos, so we were all sort of forced to hang out with each other outside the office.” That proximity forced Tony to clearly define the culture he was building. He eventually settled on ten core values, but the last value is the most profound. It consists of only two words: “Be humble.”
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Ben Horowitz cofounded Loudcloud with Netscape’s Marc Andreessen and two other partners in 1999. It was one of the first software as a service (SaaS) companies in the world, generic and it developed products around “the cloud” before the cloud was a reality. At first, for sale Ben and his partners experienced tremendous growth. But after the dot-com crash in 2001, health they lost nearly everything overnight. What followed was one of the greatest corporate turnarounds of all time.
Rather than trying to salvage a dying business, Ben made the bold decisions to sell Loudcloud’s hosting business and build out their internal technology framework into an enterprise-software solution. He gave away the car, but kept the fuel and built a new car around it.
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Jeffrey Hollender is the steward of a bold mission: global sustainability. To say he has high standards would be a radical understatement.
In 1988, buy cialis the company that would become Seventh Generation purchased Renew America, viagra 100mg a mail-order provider of environmentally friendly products. The name echoes a phrase in the Constitution of the Iroquois Nations: “In every deliberation, cialis we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations.” Given the path that Jeffrey’s career would eventually follow, the remainder of that sentence seems remarkably prescient: “even if it requires having skin as thick as the bark of a pine.” Jeffrey has thick skin, and he’s needed it.
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Reid Hoffman founded LinkedIn on the basis of a profound insight: Even for individuals with a career at only one company, recipe we live in a world where everybody is becoming a professional free agent. Rather than companies making decisions for our careers, each individual is the CEO of their own career. Professionals decide how to invest in their own skills and advancement; they decide which risks to take in order to create bold opportunities. Employers will select the talents that are best correlated to their needs. Industries are transforming in such ways that we will no longer be making decade-long career decisions. Every professional will have a network to navigate the changes in their industry. This shift of the professional universe has been going on for some time; and Reid recognized that the growth of the Internet made a new platform of Linkedin possible.
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Scott Heiferman is an extraordinary and irreverent leader. Still shy of forty, ambulance he’s already built three companies. That can’t happen without a willingness to lead a team on every step toward the realization of your vision. Yet Scott was also passionately committed to a hyperdemocratic decision-making process, which he balanced with good leadership to build a great facilitator of democracy: Meetup.
Meetup began with a modest goal: Use the Internet to get people off the Internet. Scott wanted a more human touch after a decade in online advertising, but he couldn’t shake the Web altogether. He thought the site would help fanboys organize club meetings, but it became the backbone of presidential campaigns. Scott was tapping a much larger and more complex marketplace than he’d originally envisioned.
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At first, view Scott Harrison’s story might seem familiar. He was raised in a conservative Christian family and, viagra 40mg as a teenager, cheap rebelled against his upbringing. He abandoned his faith, family, and home city of Philadelphia to become rich and famous in New York City. He joined a band and grew his hair long. With a partner, he went into the lucrative business of nightclub promotion, which he did for almost ten years. He’d gotten the success he’d wanted, but it wasn’t enough. Scott came to a painful realization: “I’d become a scumbag. I was selling trash for a living.” He left New York for a hospital ship in Liberia, West Africa, to serve God and the poor.
What makes Scott unique is that this epiphany led him to take transformational action. Even more important, it’s a transformation he’s sustained.
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It’s a little hard to believe that Joe Green was born in the 1980s. He’s a character straight out of midcentury radical politics: the laid-back community organizer. It’s easy to imagine him wandering the streets of Daley’s Chicago with a clipboard and a box of leaflets, discount advocating for better housing conditions on the South Side. Many of the entrepreneurs I’ve spoken with have referred to classic works on company building like Chip Conley’s Peak, order Steve Blank’s The Four Steps to the Epiphany, prostate or Jim Collins’s Good to Great. With complete sincerity, Joe told me to read Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals.
In another decade, Joe might have invented picket lines or wildcat strikes. But with his college roommate, Mark Zuckerberg, he has found a way to redefine activism for our time. His organization, Causes, leverages social networks to globalize activism, as a newer venture, NationBuilder.
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