Search Results for: Fast Company

The Story of Steve Jobs: An Inspiration or a Cautionary Tale?

Longreads Pick

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 better, and it didn’t have to: Apple had signed a contract granting it the business at the current pace. As Walter Isaacson describes in his best-selling biography, Steve Jobs, the recently recrowned chief executive had a simple response: Break the contract. When an Apple manager warned him that this decision would probably mean a lawsuit, Jobs responded, ‘Just tell them if they fuck with us, they’ll never get another fucking dime from this company, ever.’

“The shipper did sue. The manager quit Apple. (Jobs ‘would have fired me anyway,; he later told Isaacson.) The legal imbroglio took a year and presumably a significant amount of money to resolve. But meanwhile, Apple hired a new shipper that met the expectations of the company’s uncompromising CEO.

“What lesson should we draw from this anecdote? After all, we turn to the lives of successful people for inspiration and instruction. But the lesson here might make us uncomfortable: Violate any norm of social or business interaction that stands between you and what you want.”

Author: Ben Austen
Source: Wired
Published: Jul 23, 2012
Length: 18 minutes (4,710 words)

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 its email and not counting that money as a quarterly, recurring expense — but as a one-time, capital expense, the way Google might account for the cost of building a new server farm. 

Groupon was saying that ACSOI helped it figure out the ratio between the amount of money it needed to spend on marketing to acquire a subscriber and how much that subscriber would be worth to the company over the long haul.

But marketing expenses are not typically accounted for this way, and people looked at Groupon as though it were trying to pull a fast one.

“Inside Groupon: The Truth About The World’s Most Controversial Company.” — Nicholas Carlson, Business Insider

See also: “Groupon Therapy.” Vanity Fair, August 2011

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 its email and not counting that money as a quarterly, recurring expense — but as a one-time, capital expense, the way Google might account for the cost of building a new server farm. 

Groupon was saying that ACSOI helped it figure out the ratio between the amount of money it needed to spend on marketing to acquire a subscriber and how much that subscriber would be worth to the company over the long haul.

But marketing expenses are not typically accounted for this way, and people looked at Groupon as though it were trying to pull a fast one.

“Inside Groupon: The Truth About The World’s Most Controversial Company.” — Nicholas Carlson, Business Insider

See also: “Groupon Therapy.” Vanity Fair, August 2011

Why Software Is Eating The World

Longreads Pick

Still, we face several challenges. First of all, every new company today is being built in the face of massive economic headwinds, making the challenge far greater than it was in the relatively benign ’90s. The good news about building a company during times like this is that the companies that do succeed are going to be extremely strong and resilient. And when the economy finally stabilizes, look out—the best of the new companies will grow even faster. Secondly, many people in the U.S. and around the world lack the education and skills required to participate in the great new companies coming out of the software revolution. This is a tragedy since every company I work with is absolutely starved for talent.

Published: Aug 20, 2011
Length: 9 minutes (2,358 words)

Utne Reader: The Best Tumblrs for Magazine Freaks

Utne Reader: The Best Tumblrs for Magazine Freaks