Remove the legend to become one — Remains of the Day

I believe the best way to describe this shift is as a shift from legible ambition to illegible ambition. The reason so many people cling to default metrics of success is that other people understand them. Legible ambition is a story that your parents can tell their friends. We fear that not having such legible ambition means we will be cast out of ... See more

On the day after eBay’s IPO, when Pierre Omidyar, just back from New York, stood on Benchmark’s terrace, he observed that the world had imputed strategic savvy to the company that it did not really have. “Our system didn’t scale,” he said, “so we didn’t grow big enough to attract competition. Everybody thought we were flying below the radar screen

... See more

I asked Rob what he thought was the most revealing detail in his book. He thought for a moment before saying that it was the way Dalio treated his longtime number two and protégé, Greg Jensen . Jensen, as the book conveys, was a devoted Dalio acolyte of both the man and his Principles. Jensen was hoping to succeed Dalio and kept waiting and waiting... See more

Early on, as a search technology company, we worried about Verity, PLS, Open Text. We were too young to realize that existing companies' biggest problem is legacy. Period. They can't focus on new businesses because they've got to manage their old ones. And so when we moved to web search, it was never clear to us that Verity, PLS, and Open Text woul

... See more