[video]
[video]
Rest in peace, Steve Jobs.
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most importantly, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” - Steve Jobs, 1955-2011
Watch “Steve Jobs;How to live before you die
Rest in peace, Steve.
[video]
[video]
[video]
[video]
[video]
![Ben & Jerry’s 1983 Public Stock Offering to the residents of Vermont raised the company $750K for 17.5% of the company for a manufacturing plant, allowing them to skip venture capital and stick to their social mission. 1 in every 100 Vermont family owns some stock in Ben & Jerry’s. What a brilliant piece of business history :)!
Ultimately, Cohen and Greenfield did decide to keep the company, but they vowed not to allow the growth of their enterprise to overwhelm their ideas of how a business could be a force for positive change in a community. ‘We decided to adapt [the company] so we could feel proud to say we were the businessmen of Ben & Jerry’s,’ Cohen concluded. Among the stipulations they made to ensure that their company would be different from other parts of corporate America was a salary cap, limiting the best-paid people in the company to wages just five times higher than those of the lowest-paid employees. As Ben & Jerry’s grew, this unusual limitation would complicate the company’s high-level staffing.
To finance further growth, Greenfield and Cohen decided to raise capital to expand by selling stock to the public. However, in an effort to maintain a sense of local accountability in the company, they limited the stock offering to residents of Vermont, utilizing a little-known clause of the state law governing stocks and brokering. With the proceeds from this sale of stock, the company began construction of a new plant and corporate headquarters in Waterbury, Vermont, about half an hour away from Burlington.
Watch the documentary Biography: Ben & Jerry.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lqbbigQYlJ1qzqy0go1_500.png)
Ben & Jerry’s 1983 Public Stock Offering to the residents of Vermont raised the company $750K for 17.5% of the company for a manufacturing plant, allowing them to skip venture capital and stick to their social mission. 1 in every 100 Vermont family owns some stock in Ben & Jerry’s. What a brilliant piece of business history :)!
Ultimately, Cohen and Greenfield did decide to keep the company, but they vowed not to allow the growth of their enterprise to overwhelm their ideas of how a business could be a force for positive change in a community. ‘We decided to adapt [the company] so we could feel proud to say we were the businessmen of Ben & Jerry’s,’ Cohen concluded. Among the stipulations they made to ensure that their company would be different from other parts of corporate America was a salary cap, limiting the best-paid people in the company to wages just five times higher than those of the lowest-paid employees. As Ben & Jerry’s grew, this unusual limitation would complicate the company’s high-level staffing.
To finance further growth, Greenfield and Cohen decided to raise capital to expand by selling stock to the public. However, in an effort to maintain a sense of local accountability in the company, they limited the stock offering to residents of Vermont, utilizing a little-known clause of the state law governing stocks and brokering. With the proceeds from this sale of stock, the company began construction of a new plant and corporate headquarters in Waterbury, Vermont, about half an hour away from Burlington.
Watch the documentary Biography: Ben & Jerry.
“
I’m privileged to work with some of the best of the new breed of software companies, and I can tell you they’re really good at what they do. If they perform to my and others’ expectations, they are going to be highly valuable cornerstone companies in the global economy, eating markets far larger than the technology industry has historically been able to pursue.
Instead of constantly questioning their valuations, let’s seek to understand how the new generation of technology companies are doing what they do, what the broader consequences are for businesses and the economy and what we can collectively do to expand the number of innovative new software companies created in the U.S. and around the world.
” — Excellent, simple write-up on why software is going to keep crushing it: Marc Andreessen on Why Software Is Eating the World - WSJ.com[video]
Vote For Our SXSWi Panel! "Starting Up: The Science Behind Disruption" -
Click here to vote for our panel: Starting Up: The Science Behind Disruption!
Its quick and I’ll really appreciate it!
Starting Up: The Science Behind Disruption
This panel discussion aims to put a process behind the discovery of the infamous “Disruptive, Billion Dollar” idea. While tactical topics such as the Lean Startup Methodology are important once entrepreneurs have ideas they are actively pursuing, seldom is the process behind discovery and selection of those ideas actually discussed.
This panel aims to cover two key parts of this process:
We hope that once attendees walk out of the panel, they have mental clarity on how to discover their next great idea. Not just one that is trendy, but something truly disruptive, viable and sustainable.
“Prevention-focused countries such as Denmark have dramatically lowered the need for hospitals. Once at 155 hospitals, they are at less than a third of that today.” —
Fascinating, to say the least.
via Healthcare Disruption: Providers Are Making Newspaper Industry Mistakes (Part III)
Anonymous asked: Do you have a Afghan background?
Thanks for the question! I’m not from Afghanistan. I was actually born in Karachi, Pakistan (which of course borders Afghanistan).
I moved to Dallas, TX when I was around 12; then Austin, TX; and now San Francisco, CA (and a few places in between).
I am a Muslim (more specifically Ismaili). My ancestors are from Gujarat.
"The solution to premature commitment bias starts with a K" via @AdilWali -
As you may have noticed, I have recently found myself consumed by the problems facing technology entrepreneurship today. In particular, it’s the amount of sheer waste that gets to me. As I’ve mentioned before, the real tragedy here is all of the time that is wasted by really talented entrepreneurs and early employees. Unlike money, time is non-renewable. You don’t know how much you actually have, and you can’t make any more of it when you run out.
As an entrepreneur about to embark on my next journey, this is something I think a lot about. I want to avoid premature commitment bias like its a plague (which, by the way, it is.) And I want to find myself on the right side of the disequilibrium of success! I don’t want to bust my ass for 2-5 years just to chase a mediocre dream. Not worth it.
So here’s what I’m going to do
I’ve decided that it’s time to take a new approach to building companies. That approach involves assembling a team of the most talented people in the world. Then we’re going to unearth really hard problems and solve them.
Companies will be formed.
Fun will be had.
What about all the details?
I don’t know them yet. It makes sense to figure out the details of how this thing works after the right people are on the team. Here’s what I do know, though: we’ll be calling ourselves the Kemists.
And we’ll have a website that looks like this, and a logo that looks like this:
If you know remarkably talented people who like building companies, or are one yourself, send them to (or go to) the site and apply.
