“Like a good song, life has verses, the goliards had taught me. Each verse has to be sung. It takes all of them to make a song. It is the entire chanson you name, but when you think of it, when you smile, it is a favorite verse that delights your ears.”
―
James Patterson and Andrew Gross,
The Jester
“Expired condoms are like nuclear waste: there's nothing sensible you can do with it.” ― Andrew Smith
“No tragedy is greater than that of a single person who is afraid to do the right thing” ― Andrew Gross, The One Man
“I quit.”“You’re okay. It’s shock.”“No. I’m done.” He waved his sword at me. “She swallowed me! I was inside her!”Ascanio cracked up, showing way too many hyena teeth. I gave him the look of death and he clamped his mouth shut.“I quit!” Holland threat his sword down.“Okay,” Derek said.“Look, be reasonable,” Ascanio said. “We’ve all been there. One time there was this hungry wendigo . . .”“Redundant,” Derek said.Ascanio rolled his eyes. “The point is, weird shit happened. Weird shit happens a lot. It’s traumatic. Look, she rolled onto me. You don’t even want to know what gross things were pressed against my face.”Holland’s face jerked.“Too soon,” Derek said.” ― Ilona Andrews, Magic Binds
“In early 2014, the global economy’s top five companies’ gross cash holdings—those of Apple, Google, Microsoft, as well as the US telecom giant Verizon and the Korean electronics conglomerate Samsung—came to $387 billion, the equivalent of the 2013 GDP of the United Arab Emirates.78 This capital imbalance puts the fate of the world economy in the hands of the few cash hoarders like Apple and Google, whose profits are mostly kept offshore to avoid paying US tax. “Apple, Google and Facebook are latter-day scrooges,” worries the Financial Times columnist John Plender about a corporate miserliness that is undermining the growth of the world economy.” ― Andrew Keen, The Internet Is Not the Answer
“In early 2014, the global economy’s top five companies’ gross cash holdings—those of Apple, Google, Microsoft, as well as the US telecom giant Verizon and the Korean electronics conglomerate Samsung—came to $387 billion, the equivalent of the 2013 GDP of the United Arab Emirates.78 This capital imbalance puts the fate of the world economy in the hands of the few cash hoarders like Apple and Google, whose profits are mostly kept offshore to avoid paying US tax. “Apple, Google and Facebook are latter-day scrooges,” worries the Financial Times columnist John Plender about a corporate miserliness that is undermining the growth of the world economy.79 “So what does it all mean?” Michael Moritz rhetorically asks about a data factory economy that is immensely profitable for a tiny handful of Silicon Valley companies. What does the personal revolution mean for everyone else, to those who aren’t part of what he calls the “extreme minority” inside the Silicon Valley bubble? “It means that life is very tough for almost everyone in America,” the chairman of Sequoia Capital, whom even Tom Perkins couldn’t accuse of being a progressive radical, says. “It means life is very tough if you’re poor. It means life is very tough if you’re middle class. It means you have to have the right education to go and work at Google or Apple.” ― Andrew Keen, The Internet Is Not the Answer
“the dew-sprangled lawn and the silk of Andrew's hair knotted in his fist, the gross patch of drool spreading on his chest, watching the sun come up and thinking fierce as devotion 'this is mine forever' until sleep sucked him under again” ― Lee Mandelo, Summer Sons
“Manhattan Prep started out as one lone tutor in a Starbucks coffee shop. Less than ten years later, it was a leading national education and publishing business that employed over one hundred people and was acquired by a public company for millions of dollars. How did that happen? We delivered a service that customers liked more than what was otherwise available. They sought us out and rewarded us with their business. We hired more people, grew, and kept improving. This process—a new company filling a need and flourishing as a result—is an example of value creation. It’s the fuel of economic growth, and what our country has been seeking a formula for. It’s the process that leads to new businesses and jobs. Value creation has a polar opposite: rent-seeking. In the 1980s, economists began noticing that countries with ample natural resources experienced lower economic growth rates than others. From 1965 to 1998 in the OPEC (oil-producing) countries, gross domestic product per capita decreased on average by 1.3 percent, while in the rest of the developed world, per capita growth increased by 2.2 percent (for an overall difference of 3.5 percent). This was a surprise—if you had lots of oil in the ground, wouldn’t that give you more wealth to invest and thus spur more rapid growth? Economists cited a number of factors to explain this “resource curse,” including internal and external conflict, corruption, lower monitoring of government, lack of diversification, and being subject to higher price volatility. One other possible explanation on offer was that a country’s smart people will wind up going to work in whatever industry is throwing off money (like the oil industry in Saudi Arabia). Thus fewer talented people are innovating in other industries, dragging down the growth rate over time. This makes sense—it’s a lot easier for a gifted Saudi to plug into the Ministry of Petroleum and Mineral Resources and extract economic value than to come up with a new business or industry. Does this sort of thing happen in the United States? Yes, you can make money through rent-seeking as opposed to value or wealth creation.” ― Andrew Yang, Smart People Should Build Things: How to Restore Our Culture of Achievement, Build a Path for Entrepreneurs, and Create New Jobs in America
“the value of a personal fortune is better understood in relation to the total gross national product of an individual’s era. By that measure, Carnegie was worth $112 billion in his day, far ahead of Bill Gates ($85 billion), Sam Walton ($42 billion), or Warren Buffett ($31 billion).” ― Les Standiford, Meet You in Hell: Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and the Bitter Partnership That Transformed America
“Success comes with an inevitable problem: market saturation. New products initially grow just by adding more customers—to grow a network, add more nodes. Eventually this stops working because nearly everyone in the target market has joined the network, and there are not enough potential customers left. From here, the focus has to shift from adding new customers to layering on more services and revenue opportunities with existing ones. eBay had this problem in its early years, and had to figure its way out. My colleague at a16z, Jeff Jordan, experienced this himself, and would often write and speak about his first month as the general manager of eBay’s US business. It was in 2000, and for the first time ever, eBay’s US business failed to grow on a month-over-month basis. This was critical for eBay because nearly all the revenue and profit for the company came from the US unit—without growth in the United States, the entire business would stagnate. Something had to be done quickly. It’s tempting to just optimize the core business. After all, increasing a big revenue base even a little bit often looks more appealing than starting at zero. Bolder bets are risky. Yet because of the dynamics of market saturation, a product’s growth tends to slow down and not speed up. There’s no way around maintaining a high growth rate besides continuing to innovate. Jeff shared what the team did to find the next phase of growth for the company: eBay.com at the time enabled the community to buy and sell solely through online auctions. But auctions intimidated many prospective users who expressed preference for the ease and simplicity of fixed price formats. Interestingly, our research suggested that our online auction users were biased towards men, who relished the competitive aspect of the auction. So the first major innovation we pursued was to implement the (revolutionary!) concept of offering items for a fixed price on ebay.com, which we termed “buy-it-now.” Buy-it-now was surprisingly controversial to many in both the eBay community and in eBay headquarters. But we swallowed hard, took the risk and launched the feature . . . and it paid off big. These days, the buy-it-now format represents over $40 billion of annual Gross Merchandise Volume for eBay, 62% of their total.65” ― Andrew Chen, The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects
“Uber had to get creative to unlock the hard side of their network, the drivers. Initially, Uber’s focus was on black car and limo services, which were licensed and relatively uncontroversial. However, a seismic shift occurred when rival app Sidecar innovated in recruiting unlicensed, normal people as drivers on their platform. This was the “peer-to-peer” model that created millions of new rideshare drivers, and was quickly copied and popularized by Lyft and then Uber. Jahan Khanna, cofounder/chief technology officer of Sidecar, spoke of its origin: It was obvious that letting anyone sign up to be a driver would be a big deal. With more drivers, rides would get cheaper and the wait times would get shorter. This came up in many brainstorms at Sidecar, but the question was always, what was the regulatory framework that allows this to operate? What were the prior examples that weren’t immediately shut down? After doing a ton of research, we came onto a model that had been active for years in San Francisco run by someone named Lynn Breedlove called Homobiles that answered our question.22 It’s a surprising fact, but the earliest version of the rideshare idea came not from an investor-backed startup, but rather from a nonprofit called Homobiles, run by a prominent member of the LGBTQ community in the Bay Area named Lynn Breedlove. The service was aimed at protecting and serving the LGBTQ community while providing them transportation—to conferences, bars and entertainment, and also to get health care—while emphasizing safety and community. Homobiles had built its own niche, and had figured out the basics: Breedlove had recruited, over time, 100 volunteer drivers, who would respond to text messages. Money would be exchanged, but in the form of donations, so that drivers could be compensated for their time. The company had operated for several years, starting in 2010—several years before Uber X—and provided the template for what would become a $100 billion+ gross revenue industry. Sidecar learned from Homobiles, implementing their offering nearly verbatim, albeit in digital form: donations based, where the rider and driver would sit together in the front, like a friend giving you a ride. With that, the rideshare market was kicked off.” ― Andrew Chen, The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects
“Democratic senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois masterminded the legislation. Douglas saw the need to organize the territories and knew that he needed Southern support. Responding to pressure from Democratic senators James Mason and Robert M. T. Hunter of Virginia, Andrew Butler of South Carolina, and David Aitchison of Missouri, Douglas crafted the measure and included an “explicit repeal of the ban on slavery north of 36° 30’.”1 The repeal of the ban on slavery in new territories created a firestorm. Northern opponents, including Salmon Chase, condemned it as “an atrocious plot” of slave power to “convert free territory” into a “dreary region of despotism, inhabited by masters and slaves.”2 Chase and his allies published the “Appeal of the Independent Democrats” who “condemned this ‘gross violation of a sacred pledge’” and promised to “call the people to come to the rescue of the country from the domination of slavery.”3 Chase closed by warning that “the dearest interests of freedom and the Union are in imminent peril and called for religious and political organization to defeat the bill.” ― Steven Dundas
“Staten Island,” ― Andrew Gross, Everything to Lose
“In a recent analysis by Andreessen Horowitz of the top 100 marketplace startups, just four of the top products drive 76 percent of all the gross revenue—there is immense concentration at the top.” ― Andrew Chen, The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects
“Por esta razón el hombre fue creado al comienzo como una sola persona, para enseñarles que quienquiera que destruya una vida es considerado por las Escrituras como alguien que ha destruido un mundo entero; y quienquiera que salve una es como si hubiera salvado un mundo entero.” ― Andrew Gross, The One Man
“Nosotros solíamos decir que el cerebro sin aplicación es como la belleza sin bondad. Es un desperdicio.” ― Andrew Gross, The One Man
“Alguien me dijo que hay una sola cosa que no pueden quitarte aquí... Tus sueños.” ― Andrew Gross, The One Man
“¿Acaso estaban tan devastados que con el paso del tiempo, al llegarles la hora, era más fácil someterse que oponer resistencia? ¿O era porque entendían que resistirse era inútil de cualquier modo y que sólo estarían retrasando lo inevitable?” ― Andrew Gross, The One Man
“Sólo la integridad conduce a la claridad.” ― Andrew Gross, The One Man
“Expired condoms are like nuclear waste: there's nothing sensible you can do with it.” ― Andrew Smith
“No tragedy is greater than that of a single person who is afraid to do the right thing” ― Andrew Gross, The One Man
“I quit.”“You’re okay. It’s shock.”“No. I’m done.” He waved his sword at me. “She swallowed me! I was inside her!”Ascanio cracked up, showing way too many hyena teeth. I gave him the look of death and he clamped his mouth shut.“I quit!” Holland threat his sword down.“Okay,” Derek said.“Look, be reasonable,” Ascanio said. “We’ve all been there. One time there was this hungry wendigo . . .”“Redundant,” Derek said.Ascanio rolled his eyes. “The point is, weird shit happened. Weird shit happens a lot. It’s traumatic. Look, she rolled onto me. You don’t even want to know what gross things were pressed against my face.”Holland’s face jerked.“Too soon,” Derek said.” ― Ilona Andrews, Magic Binds
“In early 2014, the global economy’s top five companies’ gross cash holdings—those of Apple, Google, Microsoft, as well as the US telecom giant Verizon and the Korean electronics conglomerate Samsung—came to $387 billion, the equivalent of the 2013 GDP of the United Arab Emirates.78 This capital imbalance puts the fate of the world economy in the hands of the few cash hoarders like Apple and Google, whose profits are mostly kept offshore to avoid paying US tax. “Apple, Google and Facebook are latter-day scrooges,” worries the Financial Times columnist John Plender about a corporate miserliness that is undermining the growth of the world economy.” ― Andrew Keen, The Internet Is Not the Answer
“In early 2014, the global economy’s top five companies’ gross cash holdings—those of Apple, Google, Microsoft, as well as the US telecom giant Verizon and the Korean electronics conglomerate Samsung—came to $387 billion, the equivalent of the 2013 GDP of the United Arab Emirates.78 This capital imbalance puts the fate of the world economy in the hands of the few cash hoarders like Apple and Google, whose profits are mostly kept offshore to avoid paying US tax. “Apple, Google and Facebook are latter-day scrooges,” worries the Financial Times columnist John Plender about a corporate miserliness that is undermining the growth of the world economy.79 “So what does it all mean?” Michael Moritz rhetorically asks about a data factory economy that is immensely profitable for a tiny handful of Silicon Valley companies. What does the personal revolution mean for everyone else, to those who aren’t part of what he calls the “extreme minority” inside the Silicon Valley bubble? “It means that life is very tough for almost everyone in America,” the chairman of Sequoia Capital, whom even Tom Perkins couldn’t accuse of being a progressive radical, says. “It means life is very tough if you’re poor. It means life is very tough if you’re middle class. It means you have to have the right education to go and work at Google or Apple.” ― Andrew Keen, The Internet Is Not the Answer
“the dew-sprangled lawn and the silk of Andrew's hair knotted in his fist, the gross patch of drool spreading on his chest, watching the sun come up and thinking fierce as devotion 'this is mine forever' until sleep sucked him under again” ― Lee Mandelo, Summer Sons
“Manhattan Prep started out as one lone tutor in a Starbucks coffee shop. Less than ten years later, it was a leading national education and publishing business that employed over one hundred people and was acquired by a public company for millions of dollars. How did that happen? We delivered a service that customers liked more than what was otherwise available. They sought us out and rewarded us with their business. We hired more people, grew, and kept improving. This process—a new company filling a need and flourishing as a result—is an example of value creation. It’s the fuel of economic growth, and what our country has been seeking a formula for. It’s the process that leads to new businesses and jobs. Value creation has a polar opposite: rent-seeking. In the 1980s, economists began noticing that countries with ample natural resources experienced lower economic growth rates than others. From 1965 to 1998 in the OPEC (oil-producing) countries, gross domestic product per capita decreased on average by 1.3 percent, while in the rest of the developed world, per capita growth increased by 2.2 percent (for an overall difference of 3.5 percent). This was a surprise—if you had lots of oil in the ground, wouldn’t that give you more wealth to invest and thus spur more rapid growth? Economists cited a number of factors to explain this “resource curse,” including internal and external conflict, corruption, lower monitoring of government, lack of diversification, and being subject to higher price volatility. One other possible explanation on offer was that a country’s smart people will wind up going to work in whatever industry is throwing off money (like the oil industry in Saudi Arabia). Thus fewer talented people are innovating in other industries, dragging down the growth rate over time. This makes sense—it’s a lot easier for a gifted Saudi to plug into the Ministry of Petroleum and Mineral Resources and extract economic value than to come up with a new business or industry. Does this sort of thing happen in the United States? Yes, you can make money through rent-seeking as opposed to value or wealth creation.” ― Andrew Yang, Smart People Should Build Things: How to Restore Our Culture of Achievement, Build a Path for Entrepreneurs, and Create New Jobs in America
“the value of a personal fortune is better understood in relation to the total gross national product of an individual’s era. By that measure, Carnegie was worth $112 billion in his day, far ahead of Bill Gates ($85 billion), Sam Walton ($42 billion), or Warren Buffett ($31 billion).” ― Les Standiford, Meet You in Hell: Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and the Bitter Partnership That Transformed America
“Success comes with an inevitable problem: market saturation. New products initially grow just by adding more customers—to grow a network, add more nodes. Eventually this stops working because nearly everyone in the target market has joined the network, and there are not enough potential customers left. From here, the focus has to shift from adding new customers to layering on more services and revenue opportunities with existing ones. eBay had this problem in its early years, and had to figure its way out. My colleague at a16z, Jeff Jordan, experienced this himself, and would often write and speak about his first month as the general manager of eBay’s US business. It was in 2000, and for the first time ever, eBay’s US business failed to grow on a month-over-month basis. This was critical for eBay because nearly all the revenue and profit for the company came from the US unit—without growth in the United States, the entire business would stagnate. Something had to be done quickly. It’s tempting to just optimize the core business. After all, increasing a big revenue base even a little bit often looks more appealing than starting at zero. Bolder bets are risky. Yet because of the dynamics of market saturation, a product’s growth tends to slow down and not speed up. There’s no way around maintaining a high growth rate besides continuing to innovate. Jeff shared what the team did to find the next phase of growth for the company: eBay.com at the time enabled the community to buy and sell solely through online auctions. But auctions intimidated many prospective users who expressed preference for the ease and simplicity of fixed price formats. Interestingly, our research suggested that our online auction users were biased towards men, who relished the competitive aspect of the auction. So the first major innovation we pursued was to implement the (revolutionary!) concept of offering items for a fixed price on ebay.com, which we termed “buy-it-now.” Buy-it-now was surprisingly controversial to many in both the eBay community and in eBay headquarters. But we swallowed hard, took the risk and launched the feature . . . and it paid off big. These days, the buy-it-now format represents over $40 billion of annual Gross Merchandise Volume for eBay, 62% of their total.65” ― Andrew Chen, The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects
“Uber had to get creative to unlock the hard side of their network, the drivers. Initially, Uber’s focus was on black car and limo services, which were licensed and relatively uncontroversial. However, a seismic shift occurred when rival app Sidecar innovated in recruiting unlicensed, normal people as drivers on their platform. This was the “peer-to-peer” model that created millions of new rideshare drivers, and was quickly copied and popularized by Lyft and then Uber. Jahan Khanna, cofounder/chief technology officer of Sidecar, spoke of its origin: It was obvious that letting anyone sign up to be a driver would be a big deal. With more drivers, rides would get cheaper and the wait times would get shorter. This came up in many brainstorms at Sidecar, but the question was always, what was the regulatory framework that allows this to operate? What were the prior examples that weren’t immediately shut down? After doing a ton of research, we came onto a model that had been active for years in San Francisco run by someone named Lynn Breedlove called Homobiles that answered our question.22 It’s a surprising fact, but the earliest version of the rideshare idea came not from an investor-backed startup, but rather from a nonprofit called Homobiles, run by a prominent member of the LGBTQ community in the Bay Area named Lynn Breedlove. The service was aimed at protecting and serving the LGBTQ community while providing them transportation—to conferences, bars and entertainment, and also to get health care—while emphasizing safety and community. Homobiles had built its own niche, and had figured out the basics: Breedlove had recruited, over time, 100 volunteer drivers, who would respond to text messages. Money would be exchanged, but in the form of donations, so that drivers could be compensated for their time. The company had operated for several years, starting in 2010—several years before Uber X—and provided the template for what would become a $100 billion+ gross revenue industry. Sidecar learned from Homobiles, implementing their offering nearly verbatim, albeit in digital form: donations based, where the rider and driver would sit together in the front, like a friend giving you a ride. With that, the rideshare market was kicked off.” ― Andrew Chen, The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects
“Democratic senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois masterminded the legislation. Douglas saw the need to organize the territories and knew that he needed Southern support. Responding to pressure from Democratic senators James Mason and Robert M. T. Hunter of Virginia, Andrew Butler of South Carolina, and David Aitchison of Missouri, Douglas crafted the measure and included an “explicit repeal of the ban on slavery north of 36° 30’.”1 The repeal of the ban on slavery in new territories created a firestorm. Northern opponents, including Salmon Chase, condemned it as “an atrocious plot” of slave power to “convert free territory” into a “dreary region of despotism, inhabited by masters and slaves.”2 Chase and his allies published the “Appeal of the Independent Democrats” who “condemned this ‘gross violation of a sacred pledge’” and promised to “call the people to come to the rescue of the country from the domination of slavery.”3 Chase closed by warning that “the dearest interests of freedom and the Union are in imminent peril and called for religious and political organization to defeat the bill.” ― Steven Dundas
“Staten Island,” ― Andrew Gross, Everything to Lose
“In a recent analysis by Andreessen Horowitz of the top 100 marketplace startups, just four of the top products drive 76 percent of all the gross revenue—there is immense concentration at the top.” ― Andrew Chen, The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects
“Por esta razón el hombre fue creado al comienzo como una sola persona, para enseñarles que quienquiera que destruya una vida es considerado por las Escrituras como alguien que ha destruido un mundo entero; y quienquiera que salve una es como si hubiera salvado un mundo entero.” ― Andrew Gross, The One Man
“Nosotros solíamos decir que el cerebro sin aplicación es como la belleza sin bondad. Es un desperdicio.” ― Andrew Gross, The One Man
“Alguien me dijo que hay una sola cosa que no pueden quitarte aquí... Tus sueños.” ― Andrew Gross, The One Man
“¿Acaso estaban tan devastados que con el paso del tiempo, al llegarles la hora, era más fácil someterse que oponer resistencia? ¿O era porque entendían que resistirse era inútil de cualquier modo y que sólo estarían retrasando lo inevitable?” ― Andrew Gross, The One Man
“Sólo la integridad conduce a la claridad.” ― Andrew Gross, The One Man
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