Björn Jeffery

The Breakfast Machine. Exactly what it sounds like.

(via The Breakfast Machine – YouTube)

Wall Street tends to understand the transactional much better than deep customer relationships

The underlying cause of this debt glut is the $12tn of free or cheap money created by central banks since 2009, combined with near-zero interest rates. When the real price of money is close to zero, people borrow and worry about the consequences later.

The slide that most app developers seem not to have understood.

(via Activate Tech and Media Outlook 2016)

Trust takes a long time to create, but merely seconds to lose. This is true both as a company and as an employee. I was thinking about a post I wrote about a year ago on my management style and how sometimes I am mistakingly thought to not notice things since I’m not in too many details. I do notice, but I try not to lead companies or people on that level. This way of working, however, assumes that I have trust in that things are moving in the right direction and that people are genuinely doing their best.

When I lose trust in something or someone, I think it is therefore a bigger deal than for many others. Since I rely so heavily on this single point – for better or worse – I find it very hard to keep going without it. And since trust can’t be rebuilt in the same period of time that it got lost, this is hard to fix.

I’m not suggesting that this is an optimal way of running companies or managing people but it is the way that comes naturally to me. In fact, I’m not sure it really matters how one does these things. There are articles in every business magazine that gives opposing advice on a regular basis. What can be done though, is it to make sure that the people around you know what is important to you. So that there are fewer surprises when you act on what you think is right.

Regardless, here’s my advice to all the Biffs, Sebastians, Brooks, and Tiffanys who want to be kingmakers:

Venture capital is something to do at the end of your career, not the beginning. It should be your last job, not your first.

My theory is that when you’re young, you should work eighty hours a week to create a product or service that changes the world. You should not sit in board meetings listening to an entrepreneur explaining why she missed her numbers while you read email on a Blackberry and intermittently spew forth gems like, “You should partner with MySpace; I can also introduce you to a few of the losers in our portfolio.”

The illusion of creative control is maintained by the fig leaf of a songwriting credit. The performer’s name will often appear in the list of songwriters, even if his or her contribution is negligible. (There’s a saying for this in the music industry: “Change a word, get a third.”)

One thing Jeff Bezos has said that resonated with our experience is that if you want to innovate you have to be willing to be misunderstood for a long time.

“If you keep yourself topped off with ideas all the time, you never become open enough to get the sustenance you require in order to move on. You end up just recycling what is already in the zeitgeist.”

(via Robert Rowland Smith on Ideas – RSA)