I very much enjoyed Ben Horowitz's last book called, The Hard Thing About Hard Things. In fact, five years later, I still find myself going back to it in my mind, particularly the bits about high quality decision making.
So I am looking forward to his latest book about how to create and sustain the kind of business culture that you want. It's called, What You Do Is Who You Are, and that should give you a sense of where this is going.
Here's an excerpt from Ben:
Because your culture is how your company makes decisions when you’re not there. It’s the set of assumptions your employees use to resolve the problems they face every day.
It’s how they behave when no one is looking. If you don’t methodically set your culture, then two-thirds of it will end up being accidental and the rest will be a mistake.
Your culture is who you are. Who you are is not the values you list on the wall. It’s not what you say at an all-hands. It’s not your marketing campaign. It’s not even what you believe.
It’s what you do. What you do is who you are. My new book aims to help you do the things you need to do so you can be who you want to be.
If you'd like to pre-order a copy, you can do that here. 100% of the proceeds will go to anti-recidivism and to Haiti.
Jerry Neumann's recent blog post on the "taxonomy of moats" is a great summary of the ways in which companies -- and perhaps even cities -- can protect themselves against competition.
Here's an excerpt from his introduction:
Value is created through innovation, but how much of that value accrues to the innovator depends partly on how quickly their competitors imitate the innovation. Innovators must deter competition to get some of the value they created. These ways of deterring competition are called, in various contexts, barriers to entry, sustainable competitive advantages, or, colloquially, moats. There are many different moats but they have at their root only a few different principles. This post is an attempt at categorizing the best-known moats by those principles in order to evaluate them systematically in the context of starting a company.
And here is his taxonomy of moats. He identifies four main sources:
As a sidebar, consider how this might also apply to cities.
Scale, for example, matters a great deal. We know that as cities get bigger, people tend to walk faster, have broader social connections (the relationship is super-linear), and be far more productive and innovative.
If you'd like to read Jerry's full post, click here. And if you're interested in this space, I recommend you also check out Fred Wilson's recent post on, "The Great Public Market Reckoning."
A few weeks ago the WSJ published an article about Toronto's growing tech talent pool, arguing that its base now rivals the top US cities, but that it may not be an entirely good thing for the city's ecosystem. I wrote about it here.
This morning venture capitalist Fred Wilson published a post on his blog talking about the necessity of scaling tech companies in lower cost locations. It's a good follow-up to the above article/post.
Here's an excerpt from Fred:
Last week I heard some shocking numbers about salary levels for certain kinds of engineers in the bay area. I checked them out with a few of our bay area portfolio companies and they were more or less corroborated.
The tight technical labor markets in the bay area, NYC, and a number of other regions in the US are making it hard to scale software businesses without burning massive amounts of cash.
He goes on to argue that (startup) companies now need to think about scaling in other/remote locations sooner than they ever have before -- basically as soon as the company hits about 50 engineers (or 100-200 employees).
Many companies are now working with a distributed workforce. Supposedly 2/3 of the global workforce now spends at least one day of the week working remotely. I almost never work from home, but I do get how this is possible.
So what is happening is that engineering talent is spilling over into secondary markets out of necessity. There's an economic imperative to colonize. But I would imagine that, at least initially, most of the economic benefits accrue to the colonizer.