George S's List: Business & Finance

• Narrative psychology, as in the work of the New York University psychologist Jerome Bruner, for example, suggests that popular narratives, particularly human interest stories, are fundamental drivers of motivation. Several such narratives are worth looking at more closely.
• “History is feeling. It is feelings that make us do what we do; and feelings can in fact be read. But the reading of them requires writers and readers to join their minds in ways that have long been out of fashion among students of history.”
• he feelings people had long ago when they were inspired or dejected. He says he believes this will help us understand history at a deeper level

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• Once I got more situated, I started my own Meetup group and told myself that I had to start small. That’s how communities are built.
• Because he’s the king of paving new paths by being his unique self, we asked entrepreneur, creative and culture advocate, George Siosi Samuels, to share his tips. If you’re not familiar with George, he’s in constant demand, has a huge following and helps people move between paths effortlessly. He accomplished all of this by building a strong and loyal tribe, but also by sharing valuable advice for others through his own voice.

  • Rewrote this sentence as an exercise in future pacing for myself. This is what I'd like to read about myself if this were me.

• Many companies launch a product and then ask how to be more customer service-oriented. Do it from the start, and you won’t deal with that question down the line.”
• “One day, I walked into our part of the office and didn’t know everybody’s name. Can you imagine how mortifying that is to a customer care professional who prides herself on being personable and community-oriented? That’s when I formally created a level of managers.”
• Superb customer care translates into great word of mouth. The trust of your customer is not only what’s at stake; it’s the potential conviction of each customer’s network, too.
• Her school of thought prioritizes relationships built over resolutions tallied, becoming an expert decoder of customer cues and establishing a standard tone with an individual’s texture.
• Care or Don’t Care. There is no Try.
• I try to remind myself to shape the interaction with a customer to be a conversation, versus a response.
• I think that you can create a relationship by not creating a relationship.
• The company sets message and tone — individuals bring texture.
• For a long time, customer care was deprioritized and often built in haste when the need arose. Then it was acknowledged, but seen as a necessary evil. Now, from Warby Parker to Zappos, companies have increasingly made customer care indispensable to — and sometimes synonymous with — their product and reputation. It’s a wise path forward that many companies still neglect.

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• did you know that directors are legally liable for pay as you go withholding and super guarantee charge payments?

• Atlassian has shown that corporate success in Australia doesn’t need to be in the nation’s traditionally bankable sectors like resources and manufacturing.
• Economists and policymakers have been increasingly adamant that Australia needs to start looking at other sectors for future job creation.
• Atlassian on Tuesday got the green light to move its corporate headquarters to London, where it gains certain advantages, especially in tax arrangements
• One of its founders was a university scholarship drop-out. All the early staff were their mates. One of its founding values was a flourish of Sydney-sider brassiness: “Don’t f*** the customer.”
• In Atlassian’s early days, the founders turned down about a dozen approaches from would-be investors or buyers whose offers came shockingly short of the company’s value.
• Atlassian now books revenues of $US150 million a year but still behaves as an underdog.
• SydStart

  • Good event to try and attend or get into
• “There’s a lot more humility in Mike and Scott; their street cred doesn’t come from talking, but doing,”
• They’ve made it cool to be commercially successful in software

  • can we help change the perception of lawyers ordinary people have?
• SEEK started in 1997 and went through six capital-raising rounds before it listed on the stock market in April 2005
• “When I was finishing uni there was little talk or excitement about starting new companies right out of school. It wasn’t specifically encouraged as an alternative to employment,”
• Atlassian’s founders say they were sub-par students.
• Blackbird Ventures
• They had an assumption: once developed, software could be replicated and sold cheaply, and distributing the product would get even cheaper and easier as internet speeds improved.
• By June 2006, Atlassian had some 4,340 customers and 50 staff in Sydney and San Francisco who developed, supported and marketed Jira, and a collaboration platform, Confluence.
• Shit, I hope no one ever leaves Atlassian and goes to their lunchtimes and bitches about how they can’t get stuff done

• Atlassian was famously built on five core values, reflecting the 22-year-old founders’ ideals:

   
   
  1. Open company, no bullshit.
   
  2. Build everything with heart and balance.
   
  3. Don’t f*** the customer.
   
  4. Play as a team.
   
  5. Be the change you seek.

  • Culture!
• The company values are actively used in conversation, blog posts and documentation with complete sincerity
• Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar were hands-on co-CEOs and each spent about half of that first year establishing the office and Atlassian culture with the fledgling team.
• “These guys were in their early 20s. I liked them, and they were friends, so we would hang out. We would go to dinner, we would go out drinking, we would talk forever – and always about the product actually, or at least about the business.

  • Importance of socialization, bonding, being in close proximity to one another. A "band of brothers". 
• They were people Walker clearly enjoyed spending time with
• When Sergey Brin and Larry Page recruited Eric Schmidt as chairman and later CEO in 2001, the then-27 year olds told journalists that it was so Schmidt could provide adult supervision.
• older, wiser businesspeople to manage young founders Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.
• Research suggests the biggest danger facing startups is “premature scaling”, where a business tries to grow faster than demand for the product allows.
• Atlassian was “very un-Silicon Valley” in how slowly and deliberately it grew
• the duo had become more effective as co-CEOs over time, with Cannon-Brookes typically taking charge of product management, design and strategy, sales, and marketing, and Farquhar focussing on engineering and business operations.

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• 1. Invest in leading brands. Anne called them franchise names, by which she meant leading companies that created products she admired. For example, she owned Bristol-Myers, Allied Chemical and Coca-Cola. She also followed her instincts on untested companies. "When Pepsi-Cola came along, she tried it," says Fay, "and then bought PepsiCo when it was the new kid on the block."

• 2. Favor firms with growing earnings. Anne tended to ignore a stock's price-to-earnings ratio. Instead, she focused on the company's ability to increase profits. She reasoned that stocks are overpriced sometimes and underpriced others but it all works out in the end if the company's income rises year after year.

   
• 3. Capitalize on your interests. Anne always enjoyed movies. So she turned that pleasure into one of her investing themes by devouring Variety in search of the best entertainment companies. She scored big with Columbia, Paramount and Loews, as well as Capital Cities Broadcasting.

• 4. Invest in small bites. In addition to adding diversity to her portfolio, that rule automatically caused her to pick up extra shares when prices were low and avoid going overboard when prices were high.

   

• 5. Reinvest your dividends. It's the same principle as playing with the house's money in gambling, with this advantage--it's a sure moneymaker in long-term investing

   

• 6. Never sell. Or at least, never sell a stock you believe in. "For a long time in the rotten bear market of the '70s, many of her drug stocks were down, some by as much as 50%" says Fay. "But she hung on because she believed in them. She didn't panic in the crash of '87 either. She thought the general market had gotten overpriced, plus she was convinced her stocks would come back."

   

• 7. Keep informed. Anne went to all of her companies' New York City shareholder meetings. Rain, sleet or shine, she would walk over from her rent-stabilized, $450-a-month studio apartment in her trademark black coat and hat, buttonhole the CEO and demand answers, just as she did when she was an auditor. Then she would compare her notes with what the Merrill analysts were saying. Fay adds, however, that she also attended the meetings for the freebies. "Even when she had millions, she'd show up with a bag," confirms a relative. "If there was food served, she'd fill the bag and live on it for days."

   

• 8. Save with tax-exempt bonds. They provided more safety than stocks and cut her tax bill. When she died, she had 60% in stocks, 30% in bonds and 10% in cash.

   

• 9. Give something back. Her $22 million gift to Yeshiva, plus an extra $100,000 she gave to an Israeli educational group, will help countless young women realize their full potential for years to come. Yeshiva's president Norman Lamm says: "Anne Scheiber lived to be 101 years old, but here at Yeshiva University her vision and legacy will live forever." One of her relatives who wasn't left a cent, New York City bank officer Dolly Acheson, adds that the Yeshiva gift gave her a "feeling of redemption." As she puts it: "At least in the end all that money went to a very good cause."

   
• 10. And finally, enjoy your money. As intelligent as Anne Scheiber was, she failed miserably on this one. She died without one real friend; she didn't get even one phone call during her last five years of life. Says her former broker Fay: "At some level, a recluse like her must get some psychic reward to keep going on that way. But to you and me, her life was terrible. A big day for her was walking down to the Merrill Lynch vault near Wall Street to visit her stock certificates. She did that a lot."

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