Vincent Chan's Profile

We haven’t found the natural size for 37signals yet, but I can tell you that it’s not a thousand people. It’s highly unlike to be a hundred. Right now it’s 10 and it’s been in that vicinity for quite some time.

Growth begets growth and you’ll end up chasing even bigger numbers and never have the time to do what you really want.

Getting your company to the point where you can pay yourself a decent salary is a great milestone

You created something sustainable that doesn’t rely on spending other people’s money

I would want to sell a company built like this too. But there are other ways to build companies. Lots of self-made millionaires made their money selling products for a profit.

Most successful business owners could walk away from their business tomorrow and still live very comfortable lives off the money they put away.

If you’re building a company to flip, though, and feel like you have to put in endless hours to please investors and potential acquirers, I can certainly appreciate that there’ll often be something you’d much rather do.

I don’t personally think that’s a rewarding way to live, but to each his own.

I think it’s hard to be truly happy if the only reason you work is to win a paycheck. Whether it’s as an employee or a business owner.

size itself is becoming less of an advantage and more of a curse

where customers expect organizations to be quick, responsive, and flexible

Are we moving to a world where small is not just beautiful, but powerful

For one thing, it's evidence that you're winning in the marketplace. For another, it gives you the opportunity to bring in more people, which gives you access to more talent, which allows you to tap into more ideas, which you can then spread more widely — and start winning all over again.

he made the case for size based not on market power but on brain power, which puts a lot of pressure on the talents of management

but then run the company like it's the corner grocery store.

"I want to be big

at least for big-company executives who aren't as adept as Welch at tapping the idea-enhancing virtues of scale without suffering the mind-numbing costs

it speaks to just how disconnected big companies can get from their customers.

"No Thumbs, No Prints, No Service.") Would the corner grocer do something like that?

relationship between size and success.

If you can figure out, as Jack Welch did, how to add to your company's muscles without atrophying its brain, then maybe you're not too big to succeed

The strong take from the weak

But most big-company leaders, who don't share Welch's fervor for staying close to customers, better figure out how to make their organizations smarter — or they will keep getting weaker.

made us realize that half of our potential revenues lay in the eight markets we’ve already opened.

not just greedy, but disciplined. Time is short.

what really matters is whether we make more money from a customer than it costs us to get and serve that customer.

if a business works on a large scale, VCs first want to understand it on the smallest scale.

For us, this meant explaining what Redfin made this summer on a single home purchase, with a per-transaction account of what we spent on marketing to get customers ($27), on local data ($153), on customer service ($2,906) and so on. We also calculated how much annual revenue we got for every monthly unique visitor.

Numbers are just numbers if they aren’t simple enough to act on

ut Roelof asked us to annotate each graph with what statisticians call an explanatory event. What change in our business had caused revenues to shoot up?

Making a simple picture of a business trend and then correlating that with a big decision helps you understand what levers really move your business.

When there are no explanatory events, you’re just getting lucky.

Then Redfin’s Sasha Aickin quietly pointed at the headcount line of our projections and said our rate-limiting factor is probably how quickly we can hire top-notch real estate agents.

What separates a potential colossus from other businesses is the capacity to keep growing at that rate in years four, five and beyond. When Reid Hoffman looked at Redfin, his primary question was whether there were “accelerating effects,” where growth begets more growth.

For companies like Zappos and hopefully Redfin, it’s word-of-mouth about our customer service.

not the usability of the site itself, but the data we gather from visitors to that site, and the rave reviews we get from those visitors who become clients.

the pressure on us to do something proprietary helped us prioritize game-changing features that we’d put off in the past

Thinking constantly about world domination can give you a little vertigo. The way I usually get through my day is by limiting my horizon to serving the next few customers, or increasing revenues in the next few months.

But the essential job of a CEO is to tell that story, to everyone who will listen, making it better all the time

"Wait! You're about to waste 10
years of your life figuring out the path you chose out of college is
crap!"

Don't
make my mistake. Save yourself now. Even if you don't work for me. I
mean it.

Out here, you think about the future. Out here, you are surrounded by
colorful, dynamic technologists and entrepreneurs who are really making
a difference, pushing the edge.

Sure, it's an experience, but there
are life paths where you don't have to have dental surgery, or
work for a big company, to have the best life. In fact, I would argue
that you learn the wrong things working for a big company, and
that it's actually not good experience. A good experience is
when you really make something happen in the world. Big companies teach
you how to work through layers of bureaucracy and how to solve problems
in very risk-averse ways -- in short, how to make something happen in
their organization. A big company is not the safe career
choice. It's the risky choice. It risks your mind and your life.

Initially, your friends and family may not
understand why you didn't take that "safe" cube-job with the company
whose name they know, but in two years they will understand. They will
love using the websites you build, and they will talk often with their
friends about it. They will see you having a vibrant life, pushing the
edge of what's happening, and they'll be proud to know you.

It sets up a direction that takes some time to change. Aim
yourself in the right direction.

If the product is going to be viral it has to be more useful if there are friends then if there are not. So Goodreads was built to do this, our position is not catalog your books, our position is see what your friends are reading, or get excited about reading through your friends.

everywhere on the site you go we don't show you like book reviews about Harry Potter, we show you here's what your friends thought of Harry Potter, and we show you here's what everybody else thought of Harry Potter

everywhere you go you're seeing activity from your friends.

if you're on the site and you have no friends, then everywhere you go it's saying you have no friends who've read this book, add some friends. You have no friends who are discussing this right now, add some friends. So you know this idea is kind of built into it, and everywhere you go on the site you're kind of getting this reminder that there's stuff happening here and your friends are talking about it, and that just kind of helps get the concept across that hey, I should add friends.

If I look around and don’t see programmers

you have 18 months to build your business. You have figured out how to get some programmers to work with you. Make them as absolutely productive as they can be.

In those situations it doesn’t really matter who is right, either, you gotta pick one direction and go with it, startups don’t have enough resources to try out two directions

Always bad because the best people get pissed and/or leave

You say yes too often, particularly in engineering decisions.

Because they set priorities on other things that mattered more.

If there’s one thing I like about Evan Williams, founder of Blogger and Twitter, is that he doesn’t try to do it all. In fact he prides himself on NOT doing things

It takes great leadership to say “no, Scoble, you can’t have more than 500 members on a list.”

Startups pick old technology because it’s familiar.

12. You don’t change direction fast enough. Every startup should be looking at its direction every month or so. Are things going according to plan? If not, fix them. But sometimes you just made bad assumptions about what the market would want from you. That’s OK! But don’t take a year to change directions, change quickly and you’ll have a chance to save the company.

 First of all, in almost all startups, the idea changes – often dramatically – over time. Secondly, ideas are relatively abundant. For every decent idea there are very likely other people who’ve also thought of it, and, surprisingly often, are also actively pitching investors.

What you should really be focused on when pitching your early stage startup is pitching yourself and your team.  When you do this, remember that a startup is primarily about building something.  Hence the most important aspect of your backgrounds is not the names of the schools you attended or companies you worked at – it’s what you’ve built.

The story you should tell is the story of someone who has been building stuff her whole life and now just needs some capital to take it to the next level.

come back when you have a demo

They aren’t wondering whether your product can be built – they are wondering whether you can build it.

Secondly, Rosenblatt noted that Demand Media content creators have choices in the market - but they choose to work for Demand Media.

quality is based on relevance

It's relevant content to many people, but is it good content? Apparently it was to the people who've read it, as it has 5 stars...

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