Throughout high school and into college, Blecharczyk wrote customized tools for spammers. He eventually developed a suite of e-mail marketing products to help them organize and orchestrate their campaigns and maneuver around internet service providers that were desperately attempting to shut off the spam deluge. The orders poured in, as did the cash. (查看原文)
when traditional advocacy failed, Uber could mobilize its user base and direct their passion toward elected officials. Uber was not the first company to employ this tactic, but it quickly became among the best at it. In its ensuing first wave of political battles—in places like Cambridge, Massachusetts, Philadelphia, and Chicago—Uber would enlist the support of its customers and, usually, win. (查看原文)
So there's a couple of things you need to do. The first thing you need to do is grow really, really fast. You either want to be below the radar or big enough that you are an institution. The worst is being somewhere in between. All your opposition knows about you but you are not a big enough community that people will listen to you yet.
You have to get what I guess I'd call escape velocity. If a rocket takes off, there's a bumpy ride before you get to orbit, and then there's a little bit more stillness.
The second thing is you need to be willing to partner with cities and tell your story. We found the most importatn thing to do is to go and meet city officials. If people dislike you or if peope hat you, it's often normal to ignore them, to avoid them or to hate them back. The only real sol... (查看原文)
"I was personally always of the philosophy that the great companies, the Paypals of the world, don't get scared by regulation, " she told me. "I never wanted to be the kind of lawyer that just said no (查看原文)
The Facebook IPO on May 18, 2012, had been a messy affair, with technical problems in the NASDAQ that delayed trading for thirty minutes and a stock price that barely rose at all that first day, then sank into a prolonged slump. The IPO was a litmus test for how the world viewed Silicon Valley and its burgeoning technological revolution. The judgment, it seemed, was harsh
But over the next year, Facebook executives and their headstrong leader, Mark Zuckerberg, acquitted themselves well. The company restructured its business to exploit the smartphone wave, leading to an uptick in advertising sales and a flourishing stock price four quarters later. On June 31, 2013. Facebook stock exceeded its IPO price, and by the end of that year, it was up a robust 45 percent. That meant that even invest... (查看原文)
Investors tend to ricochet between dueling anxieties: fear of losing money and fear of missing out. Facebook's success suggested that an overabundance of caution in the dawning digital age was misplaced. But it wasnt so easy for pattern-matching investors to simply find and back the next Facebook. Now familiar with the headache of pulling off an IPO and publicly reporting their financials every three months, high techs premier startups were taking longer to go public. The best, perhaps only, chance for investors was to claw their way into the fund-raising rounds of the hottest private companies. (查看原文)
So financial firms that had historically been tuned to backing public companies started to look for opportunities in private firms, and the flood of new capital into Silicon Valley in the years following Facebook's resurgence spawned heightened competition for deals and pushed valuations up, up, and into the stratosphere. In a span of Just six months, the mutual fund manager Fidelity Investments lead a round in the image-sharing site pinterest at a $3.5 billion valuation, while the investment management firm Black Rock led the financing of the online-storage starup Dropbox, valuing it at $10 billion. These were eye-popping numbers Silicon Valley had never seen before in private companies, and they carried the strong whiff of irrationality that had characterized the first dot-com boom. But ... (查看原文)
These were the unmistakable signs of a startup growing up, shedding its identity as an upstart, and marching toward an eventual IPO. Just like Uber, it would first have to convince public investors that it had resolved its regulatory problems and achieved Cheskv's coveted escape velocity. Beyond that lay the ceaseless drumbeat of corporate adulthood (查看原文)
作者: Brad Stone 副标题: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World isbn: 0316388394 书名: The Upstarts 页数: 384 定价: USD 30.00 出版社: Little, Brown and Company 装帧: Hardcover 出版年: 2017-1-31
