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Many highly successful companies—the aforementioned big G being one—have thrived by taking on areas that everyone thought were done and redoing them right. Also? Get a good, non-generic name. Easier said than done, granted. But the most common mistake in naming is trying to be too descriptive, which leads to lots of hard-to-distinguish names.

One of Google's biggest strengths—and sources of frustration for outsiders—was their willingness to say no to opportunities, easy money, potential employees, and deals.

Better to iterate a hundred times to get the right feature right than to add a hundred more.

Great products almost always come from someone scratching their own itch. Create something you want to exist in the world. Be a user of your own product. Hire people who are users of your product. Make it better based on your own desires. (But don't trick yourself into thinking you are your user, when it comes to usability.)

The TypePad approach—taking the high-end position in the market—makes for a great business model in the right market. Less support. Less scalability concerns. Less abuse. And much higher margins.

Acquisitions are much easier if they're small. And small acquisitions are possible if valuations are kept low from the get go. And keeping valuations low is possible because it doesn't cost much to start something anymore (especially if you keep the scope narrow).

What's so unnatural about working for a big company? The root of
the problem is that humans weren't meant to work in such large
groups.

Another thing you notice when you see animals in the wild is that
each species thrives in groups of a certain size. A herd of impalas
might have 100 adults; baboons maybe 20; lions rarely 10. Humans
also seem designed to work in groups, and what I've read about
hunter-gatherers accords with research on organizations and my own
experience to suggest roughly what the ideal size is: groups of 8
work well; by 20 they're getting hard to manage; and a group of 50
is really unwieldy.

And when you propagate that constraint, the result is that
each person gets freedom of action in inverse proportion to the
size of the entire tree

For example, working for a big company is the default thing to do,
at least for programmers. How bad could it be? Well, food shows
that pretty clearly. If you were dropped at a random point in
America today, nearly all the food around you would be bad for you.
Humans were not designed to eat white flour, refined sugar, high
fructose corn syrup, and hydrogenated vegetable oil. And yet if
you analyzed the contents of the average grocery store you'd probably
find these four ingredients accounted for most of the calories.
"Normal" food is terribly bad for you. The only people who eat
what humans were actually designed to eat are a few Birkenstock-wearing
weirdos in Berkeley.

If "normal" food is so bad for us, why is it so common? There are
two main reasons. One is that it has more immediate appeal. You
may feel lousy an hour after eating that pizza, but eating the first
couple bites feels great. The other is economies of scale.
Producing junk food scales; producing fresh vegetables doesn't.
Which means (a) junk food can be very cheap, and (b) it's worth
spending a lot to market it.

If people have to choose between something that's cheap, heavily
marketed, and appealing in the short term, and something that's
expensive, obscure, and appealing in the long term, which do you
think most will choose?

It's the same with work. The average MIT graduate wants to work
at Google or Microsoft, because it's a recognized brand, it's safe,
and they'll get paid a good salary right away. It's the job
equivalent of the pizza they had for lunch. The drawbacks will
only become apparent later, and then only in a vague sense of
malaise.

And founders and early employees of startups, meanwhile, are like
the Birkenstock-wearing weirdos of Berkeley: though a tiny minority
of the population, they're the ones living as humans are meant to.
In an artificial world, only extremists live naturally.

This seems an inevitable consequence of bigness. It's true even
in the smartest companies. I was talking recently to a founder who
considered starting a startup right out of college, but went to
work for Google instead because he thought he'd learn more there.
He didn't learn as much as he expected. Programmers learn by doing,
and most of the things he wanted to do, he couldn't—sometimes
because the company wouldn't let him, but often because the company's
code wouldn't let him. Between the drag of legacy code, the overhead
of doing development in such a large organization, and the restrictions
imposed by interfaces owned by other groups, he could only try a
fraction of the things he would have liked to. He said he has
learned much more in his own startup, despite the fact that he has
to do all the company's errands as well as programming, because at
least when he's programming he can do whatever he wants.

There is one thing companies can do short of structuring themselves
as sponges: they can stay small. If I'm right, then it really
pays to keep a company as small as it can be at every stage.
Particularly a technology company. Which means it's doubly important
to hire the best people. Mediocre hires hurt you twice: they get
less done, but they also make you big, because you need more of
them to solve a given problem.

In an essay I wrote a couple years ago
I advised graduating seniors
to work for a couple years for another company before starting their
own. I'd modify that now. Work for another company if you want
to, but only for a small one, and if you want to start your own
startup, go ahead.

在境内企业属于外商投资企业的情况下,海外控股公司对该外商投资企业的股权重组,属于外商投资企业投资者股权变更,应适用有关外商投资企业法律、法规和规定,特别是《外商投资企业投资者股权变更的若干规定》(“《外资股权变更规定》”)的规定。

所谓“扶持股”，即不参加分红的股份，在无锡往往要占到政府投资的一大部分。如果赔了，就算是风险投资，创业者不用补偿；盈利后，创业者可以按照近似于银行利息的代价回购，可以说，这一部分股份的风险是完全由政府来承担的。

People

What do I mean by good people? One of the best tricks I learned
during our startup was a rule for deciding
who to hire. Could you
describe the person as an animal? It might be hard to translate
that into another language, but I think everyone in the US knows
what it means. It means someone who takes their work a little too
seriously; someone who does what they do so well that they pass
right through professional and cross over into obsessive.

What it means specifically depends on the job: a salesperson who
just won't take no for an answer; a hacker who will stay up till
4:00 AM rather than go to bed leaving code with a bug in it; a PR
person who will cold-call New York Times reporters on their cell
phones; a graphic designer who feels physical pain when something
is two millimeters out of place.

For programmers we had three additional tests. Was the person
genuinely smart? If so, could they actually get things done? And
finally, since a few good hackers have unbearable personalities,
could we stand to have them around?

A 10% improvement in ease of use doesn't just increase
your sales 10%. It's more likely to double your sales.

This is not just a theoretical question. Software is a very
competitive business, prone to natural monopolies. A company that
gets software written faster and better will, all other things
being equal, put its competitors out of business. And when you're
starting a startup, you feel this very keenly. Startups tend to
be an all or nothing proposition. You either get rich, or you get
nothing. In a startup, if you bet on the wrong technology, your
competitors will crush you.

What were the results of this experiment? Somewhat surprisingly,
it worked. We eventually had many competitors, on the order of
twenty to thirty of them, but none of their software could compete
with ours. We had a wysiwyg online store builder that ran on the
server and yet felt like a desktop application. Our competitors
had cgi scripts. And we were always far ahead of them in features.
Sometimes, in desperation, competitors would try to introduce
features that we didn't have. But with Lisp our development cycle
was so fast that we could sometimes duplicate a new feature within
a day or two of a competitor announcing it in a press release. By
the time journalists covering the press release got round to calling
us, we would have the new feature too.

The same thing will happen if you're running a startup, of course.
If you do everything the way the average startup does it, you should
expect average performance. The problem here is, average performance
means that you'll go out of business. The survival rate for startups
is way less than fifty percent. So if you're running a startup,
you had better be doing something odd. If not, you're in trouble.

The more of an IT flavor the job descriptions
had, the less dangerous the company was. The safest kind were the
ones that wanted Oracle experience. You never had to worry about
those. You were also safe if they said they wanted C++ or Java
developers. If they wanted Perl or Python programmers, that would
be a bit frightening-- that's starting to sound like a company
where the technical side, at least, is run by real hackers. If I
had ever seen a job posting looking for Lisp hackers, I would have
been really worried.