| — | Ash Maurya in “Running Lean” |
The iPad is the training wheels for HTML5.
Don’t try to be “social”: the big social platforms are created. You can’t create a social company, it’s just a checkbox. “The last 500 social companies funded by the VC community are all worthless. I’m serious.”
But this creates an opportunity: while everyone is focused on social distribution, there’s a huge opportunity to get content right with HTML5. “Let’s create a new product, the way music videos were a new product.”
Early in his political career, Julius Caesar is said to have wept upon reading a biography of Alexander the Great. When asked why, he apparently said, “Do you think, I have not just cause to weep, when I consider that Alexander at my age had conquered so many nations, and I have all this time done nothing that is memorable!”
—-
Earlier, to me the game meant maximizing your time and potential to get somewhere, now it meant maximizing those things to enjoy the trip.
—-
The answer to how you pick the destination: by asking yourself, what do I want to see grow? What do I want to build?
“What could I build that would be a like a dream come true for independent musicians?”
What an extraordinarily universal way to construct a product, a service or a business. Notice that dreams are rarely “within reason” or “under the circumstances.” No, dreams are dreams. If your business is a dream come true for customers, you win. Game over.
| — | Seth Godin quoting Derek Sivers of CD Baby |
| — | Reed Hastings |
Right. Just like Microsoft stopped AOL from winning the early online wars. And AOL stopped Yahoo! from winning the Internet portal wars. And Yahoo! in turn killed Google when it came to search. While Google stopped Facebook in their tracks when they built a social networking company. And Facebook stomped out Twitter from building an open social network. And we know how Facebook stomped out FourSquare.
And on and on. eBay / StubHub. Amazon / Zappos. Twitter / Instagram.
Focus wins.
| — | Mark Suster |
| — | Patrick Moberg |
| — | Seth Godin, “In search of a biz monkey (why bother?)” |
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the MAN who is actually IN THE ARENA, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
-Theodore Roosevelt, CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC, “The Man in the Arena”
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