Unlike so many entrepreneurs in the digital age, decease Michael is not a “visionary” who runs roughshod over the details. He’s closer to a retail owner: he pays attention to every dollar, health every nut and bolt. (He also has the fiduciary responsibility of a traditional small-business owner; when his previous venture failed, sale Michael made sure that every friend and family member who invested was made whole. That sense of honor informs everything he does.) In an industry saturated with venture capital, it is easy to forget that this is how nearly every company in the world is actually built: dollar by dollar. Michael is very familiar with the venture-capital world, but he has still built SkipHop by paying attention to every component of the business and optimizing it to the most efficient outcome.
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In the early ’90s, drug Razorfish was the Studio 54 of online agencies, pharmacy and Jeff Dachis was one of the iconic figures of the East Coast IT world. There’s always been a theatrical, recipe rock-star quality to Jeff. But if theater were all there was to Jeff and his companies, Razorfish would not have survived the dot-com downturn of 2001, and it certainly wouldn’t have grown to one of the largest digital-services agencies in the world. Jeff created real value for his clients, pioneering innovations like the animated websites that we all take for granted today.
Now, with the Dachis Group, Jeff is doing for social media what he did with the world of the Mosaic Web browser in 1995. In the past, his predictions have been spot-on. Whatever direction the Dachis Group takes in the future, expect the rest of the market to follow.
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The most profound ideas are the most obvious, healing and Chip Conley’s idea is so profound that it can be stated in two words. Businesses, capsule he teaches us, should “create joy.”
After abandoning the world of corporate real estate, Chip set out on his lifelong mission when he bought the Phoenix Hotel in San Francisco. Within a few months, he transformed a rundown, pay-by-the-hour motel into the hippest spot in the city. The hotel’s restaurant, Miss Pearl’s Jam House, became an institution. Rock stars like David Bowie and movie stars like Johnny Depp were frequent guests. Most twenty-six-year-olds would have been more than satisfied with that lifestyle, and Chip could very well have stopped right there. He didn’t.
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At the most basic level, healing every business is about finding and remedying a market inefficiency. Robin Chase has a visceral aversion to inefficiency. As far as she’s concerned, Zipcar is a data company; the cars are almost incidental. Zipcar exists to bring collaborative consumption to the problem of solving inefficient resource allocation. As Robin points out, most people only use their cars about 5 percent of the time; she just can’t tolerate that level of waste.
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In the early days on TheLadders, viagra sale Marc Cenedella could not have been a more hands-on entrepreneur. Frustrated with the costs and pace of professional software development, Marc taught himself to code and built the first version of TheLadders. Confident that nobody was better than he was at finding high-quality job listings, he assembled all of the early data that fueled the site. Marc never allows himself to get lost in the details of product development, or any other aspect of his business. He always has his eye on the next milestone and the path toward it.
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Everything that we take for granted today is the result of a dream someone dared to pursue in the past. Steve Case can legitimately claim that he was one of the first to imagine what we now call the commercial Internet.
Throughout the 1990s, treatment Steve and the AOL team were expanding the reach of email and online access — and literally getting America online. While it is nearly impossible to believe today, help they were doing this at a time when the majority of Americans did not yet own computers, much less modems. When Steve cofounded America Online in 1985, 2 percent of Americans were online. Steve was a man ahead of his time, and he was ahead of his time for a long time.
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Jeff Bussgang brings the methodical passion of an architect or an engineer to the practice of building companies. Like an engineer, buy cialis he wants to build perfect objects — the watch that’s beautifully designed and tells time correctly. And like other practical-minded artisans, Jeff wants his creations to have an economic impact.
When he’s deciding whether to build or invest in a company, Jeff is clinical in the measurement of business opportunities. Of course, there are dangers to that approach, namely missed opportunities. Many businesspeople with an academic turn of mind (and most MBAs) are uncomfortable making decisions unless they have all the information. Jeff isn’t like that. He’ll synthesize all the data available to him, however limited it might be, and if he is satisfied, he’ll take a risk.
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All of us have sci-fi fantasies about what the future will look like. “Flying cars” make frequent appearances, pill and much of the rest is also a variation on The Jetsons. High on the wish list, of course, is Rosie, the robotic maid. Push the time frame out far enough — fifty years, a hundred years, two hundred years — and most people will say that this kind of progress is inevitable. But Rodney Brooks, creator of the Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner, reminds us that nothing is “inevitable.” Somebody with a concrete vision of the future has to build it.
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Matt Blumberg is the startup scientist. In everything he does, mind he’s conducting research: studying, drug testing, recording, validating. He collects data and allows it to speak for itself. When he reaches a conclusion, he becomes very resolved in his thinking; his ideas have the power of proofs. But Matt is humble enough to realize that every scientific proof is amenable to revision. A voracious reader and a careful listener, Matt is always open to hearing new arguments and considering new findings. Most strikingly, though, he’s a prodigious contributor to his own discoveries.
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