Last year Shaxson published a Vanity Fair article, “A Tale of Two Londons,” that described the residents of one of London’s most exclusive addresses—One Hyde Park—and the accounting acrobatics they had performed to get there.
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Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
How In-N-Out Withstood Competition By Not Changing Anything and Taking Care of Employees
Under her three-year tenure, In‑N‑Out has expanded—cautiously—into Texas, a move she says has been in the works for a decade. That foray brought one rare, considerably less-than-daring change to the company’s formula: It added iced sweet tea to the menu. “We knew that everybody loves sweet tea there,” Snyder explains. “It’s not that hard. We […]
Posted inUncategorized
A startup keeps searching for its winning formula: While their neighbors toiled away, building unglamorous businesses, Justin.tv’s March 19, 2007, launch became an immediate sensation. The San Francisco Chronicle did a front-page story. Ann Curry, in an excruciating Today show interview, lectured Kan. “Fame, I have to tell you, Justin, has a price,” she said. […]
Posted inUncategorized
“An Intimate Portrait Of Innovation, Risk, And Failure Through Hipstamatic’s Lens.” — Austin Carr, Fast Company More from Fast Company
Posted inEditor's Pick
Sex, Drugs and Video Games
[Site not safe for work] A profile of Nolan Bushnell, the entrepreneur behind Atari and Chuck E. Cheese: “With Atari on the brink, Bushnell had to dig himself out of his hole fast. He hatched a business philosophy that became his guiding principle: the meta-game. Knowing Atari’s hardware was being copied by competitors, Bushnell began […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Can Andrea Rossi’s Infinite-Energy Black Box Power The World—Or Just Scam It?
An Italian inventor may have created a machine that can generate so much cheap energy, it would put oil companies out of business. Or it all may be a spectacular scam: “On the last day of the conference, Dennis Bushnell, chief scientist at Langley Research Center, summed up the state of LENR research. Guys like […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
An Intimate Portrait Of Innovation, Risk, And Failure Through Hipstamatic’s Lens
They were the vintage photo app that came before Instagram—but failure to take advantage of social, infighting among the leadership and indecision about their product caused the company to miss its opportunity: “Fast Company reached out to a slew of top-tier VCs but was unable to find one who had met with or even looked […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Story of Steve Jobs: An Inspiration or a Cautionary Tale?
Entrepreneurs continue to reflect on the lessons of Steve Jobs—is his story ultimately a cautionary tale about a person obsessed with the wrong things in life? “Soon after Steve Jobs returned to Apple as CEO in 1997, he decided that a shipping company wasn’t delivering spare parts fast enough. The shipper said it couldn’t do […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Inside Groupon: The Truth About The World’s Most Controversial Company
Groupon actually lost $413 million in 2010. Diving into the S-1, it turned out that Groupon only considered itself profitable because it used a peculiar accounting metric of its own creation — adjusted consolidated segment operating income, or ACSOI. Basically, Groupon was taking the money it was spending on advertising to acquire new subscribers to […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
How Russian Tycoon Yuri Milner Bought His Way Into Silicon Valley
To many, Milner’s success is not just too much and too fast in a land of too much and too fast but … but … and here people start to petulantly phumpher … somehow unfair: Here’s an outsider who has handed out money at outrageously founder-friendly terms—paying huge amounts for relatively small stakes, essentially buying […]
