Tag: people (Page 2 of 12)

There’s something about you turntable.fm

July 3, 2011 / elias

Three weeks ago, Turntable.fm became the hype in the echo chamber. Like I do with everything, I’m been observing and reflecting on how it’s being used by other people and myself. In short, I like it. It’s such a simple idea that could further disrupt the traditional radio business.

What it is
For the uninitiated, it’s an an Internet radio station, with a quirky web page that people interact in. People either sit in the room bopping their heads (approving the music) or people put themselves in the DJ chair and compete against another 4 DJ’s for the best tunes according to the room theme.

My first observation: Spotify will kill it. Or not.
While they appear to be completely different, I keep thinking about my Spotify experience a year ago when I was in Europe: I was hooked. And it was for the same reason — I could subscribe to a friends playlist (turntable I can follow a friend and hear when they play). The benefit is that I can get filtered serendipity and discovery, like how radio has done for decades. (For example, you may love a particular kind of music but have no idea what the latest tracks are or the time to curate playlists — but you have friends who do so would rather follow their enthusiasm.)

Turntable’s cool, but I keep thinking it’s Myspace and Spotify is Facebook. When Spotify launches in the US (rumoured to finally be this month), then turntable’s core value in providing this discovery will be replaced as Spotify is just an amazing service. But I’m not so sure about that now, as actually it might be away where playlists in Spotify get generated so it’s completely complementary.

My second observation: it’s competitive curation
In this explosion of social media, people are starting to appreciate the role editors played in the traditional media. Curated content is a skill that algorithms still can’t beat humans at (and actually, the best kinds are based off existing human preferences).

With Turntable, you select a room and sit there listening to the music. People compete for the “DJ” spot at the table (of which there are a maximum of 5). A chat room allows people in the room to chat like the old days of IRC and give direct feedback to the DJ’s or discuss music. The vote meter helps regulate the quality of music as high votes not only impact the DJ’s rating but down votes can cut the song being played and move onto the next DJ’s track.

This motivation to please the crowd means there is an active effort to curate the playlists into something worthwhile. That’s an interesting concept to consider, as playlists in past have tended to be done by people along without real consideration of others listening to it (or at least, real time feedback to consider it).

My third observation: it’s social, like the Athenian assembly social

I don’t fully understand why yet, but the chat room aspect is the most powerful component of the experience despite being the most subtle. While the voting mentioned in my second observation creates a motivation to enhance their DJ reputation by playing good music, the chatroom makes this curation directly in touch with the audience.

It’s like a democracy, where those representing and controlling the room’s music are actually completely dependent on the goodwill of the audience. The voting is the main way this is enforced, but the chatroom is where people will negotiate. Games will be determined where certain patterns in music will be played; feedback of bad songs will be given to DJ’s; and requests will be sent. It’s like a radio station completely accountable to its audience.

Like Twitter, the service will evolve based on these discussions. Some of Twitter’s most useful features like @ replying (which turned it into a communications tool) and hashtags (which turned into into a information resource) were invented and popularised by their most passionate users. Turntable.fm offers a similar utility around music and I think will evolve in a similar way. Like any startup, it’s hard to know where turntable.fm will be in six months time, but one things for sure: it’s sticky and it’s only going to get better.

I’m a hustler baby

May 5, 2011 / elias

Out of StartupBus this year, I’ve seen some amazing hackers. It’s a culture I’ve tried to encourage since we first ran the event (and more on that below on what I mean by that). But what about the non-technical people, are they hackers? Yes, but no. I came to a new realisation this March that you need more than a hacker to be successful in a startup: you need someone who can hustle. And often that’s what the “business” person is in the founding team.

I’m not the first person to realise this and in fact, my friend Micah wrote an excellent post about this last July.

So what’s a hustler? And actually, what’s a hacker? Let’s start there first — Micah says the following:

A Hacker is more than a code monkey, who can quickly build software and find interesting ways to hack together code. Thats a developer. Thats someone who is definitely an important part of a startup, but not critical to its success. A Hacker is someone who looks the problem, and solves it in a unique and special way. A Hacker finds the process of problem solving exciting and interesting, and spends the majority of their time looking at the problem in multiple ways, finding many potential solutions.

Paul Graham wrote a great essay on it many years ago. I’m still trying to work out myself what a greater hacker is, but I would essentially define a hacker as someone who understands how to make the best decisions to prioritise their efforts on what has the biggest impact in the shortest amount of time. Meaning, a perfectionist will treat a challenge as a sum of equal parts, diligently working through all the work without regard of the higher purpose. A hacker, would think of the end goal and take shortcuts on the things that are not core to the long-term effect.

It would be like me saying I need something that looks like a clock, so that it fills a void in the background for a movie shoot I need to do. I tell you that you have 24 hours. There’s nothing you can buy, and it needs to be made by you from materials on a farm the shoot is occurring.
A perfectionist would get lost in the mechanics and the quest to build a functional clock, where the hands correspond to the actual time. A hacker would get a hamster spinning in a wheel, which triggers movement of the clock’s hands. Both work, it’s just the perfectionist will plan on work that will take a month building it, forgetting the fact he needs to do it in 24 hours or he fails; the hacker’s solution isn’t a long term solution, but that’s the point — it’s achieving the purpose for what is needed right now.

So what’s a hustler? I think it’s a different skill set. Micah defines it as follows:

A Hustler on the other other hand is a relationship builder. Someone who can build direct relationships with their customers. They arent really promoters, although they do a lot of promotion. They arent salespeople, although they do a lot of selling. They are passion people. They have the ability to articulate their passion clearly and in a way that gets other people equally passionate.

Unlike a hacker, the hustler isn’t required to prioritise their efforts. Instead, what they do is extract value from, say another person (like paying customers). It’s like saying a hacker is someone who smartly builds value of a product, while the hustler smartly builds value by selling the product. Hackers are good at products and process (the value creation), hustlers are good at selling and relationships (capturing the value generated).

These days in tech, they say a good designer is needed along with a good coder, but I think this is just talking about a specific skill set. Hackers might not know how to code or use photoshop: but they can get the job done. It’s a mentality. And likewise, a hustler can come in very different forms, depending on the industry and the team. But make no mistake, if you’re looking for a founding team, you need a least one hustler. Because without someone to hustle the customers, you have no real business in the long term.

Minimum Viable Business

March 23, 2011 / elias

The first dot com bubble was about moving the offline world online; whereas the second boom dubbed “web 2.0” was about innovating on the “user experience” and making the world a more ajaxy place with the web appear more like the desktop experience. What we’re seeing now is the domination of a new trend, but this time on the capital and business side.

Minimum Viable Product — also known as MVP — was one of the first new buzz words I heard when I moved to Silicon Valley in mid 2009. Two years on, its become one of most over-used terms in the industry along with “pivoting” and the rest of the lexicon branded under “lean startup methodology”, due to the initial insight of Steve Blank and amplified by the work of Eric Ries.

We recently ran StartupBus (coverage here) and Anthony Broad-Crawford on reflection with me when debriefing helped coin terms that described what we were doing.

Something that we try to do with StartupBus is have people understand the most effective way to build a startup business. Not the most effective way to build a product or the most effective pitch — but instead, the most effective way to start a business. Last year for example, I threw everyone off on the Santa Monica pier en route to Austin and had them record videos of people that they would pitch their ideas to. The conductors (alumni from last year running one of the buses this year) clearly liked that and this year, each of the six buses had the “buspreneurs” required to engage with strangers like people at bars or in the street — getting immediate market validation of their concepts.

Minimum Viable Business is clearly a play (or is that “pivot”) of the term MVP. But I think it’s more important. Let’s think about this: Why do you raise capital in a startup? Its so we can purchase resources and hire talent. And the reason why we have talent, is so that it will result in building and supporting a product. A product, that we hope will one day have paying customers that will sustain our operations.

So to repeat, why do we build products? So that customers will pay for value we create. But what if we could get customers paying us, without a product — doesn’t that make us no longer a startup business?

MVP is a term that has justifiably made the industry rethink about how we approach product development. But let’s not forget, that a product is a way to gain customers. Just like with product development, we need business development — and building a MVP does not guarantee you anything but a less-white elephant. If we are building a startup, let’s focus on what really matters — paying customers — and work our way backwards to how we can create a Minimum Viable Business.

If you showed your MVB in the middle of a forest, would anyone care? The correct answer, is that they should be hunting you down to hand you cash. Who cares if you have a lean product, it’s much better for you to have a phat one that generates passionate (paying) customers. Call me crazy, but that’s just how business works.

Platform growth over user privacy

January 18, 2011 / elias

Facebook announced that data about yourself (like your phone number) would now be shared with applications. Since the announcement, they’ve backed down (and good work to ReadWriteWeb for raising awareness of this).

I’ve been quoted in RWW and other places as saying the following:

“Users should have the ability to decide upfront what data they permit, not after the handshake has been made where both Facebook and the app developer take advantage of the fact most users don’t know how to manage application privacy or revoke individual permissions,” Bizannes told the website. “Data Portability is about privacy-respecting interoperability and Facebook has failed in this regard.”

Let me explain what I mean by that:

This first screenshot is what users can do with applications. Facebook offers you the ability to manage your privacy, where you even have the ability to revoke individual data authorisations that are not considered necessary. Not as granular as I’d like it (my “basic information” is not something I share equally with “everyone”, such as apps who can show that data outside of Facebook where “everyone” actually is “everyone”), but it’s a nice start.

This second screenshot, is what it looks like when you initiate the relationship with the application. Again, it’s great because of the disclosure and communicates a lot very simply.

But what the problem is, is that the first screenshot should be what you see in place of the second screenshot. While Facebook is giving you the ability to manage your privacy, it is actually paying lipservice to it. Not many people are aware that they can manage their application privacy, as it’s buried in a part of the site people seldom use.

The reason why Facebook doesn’t offer this ability upfront is for a very simple reason: people wouldn’t accept apps. When given a yes or no option, users think “screw it” and hit yes. But what if they did this handshake, they were able to tick off what data they allowed or didn’t allow? Why are all these permissions required upfront, when I can later deactivate certain permissions?

Don’t worry, its not that hard to answer. User privacy doesn’t help with revenue revenue growth in as much as application growth which creates engagement. Being a company, I can’t blame Facebook for pursuing this approach. But I do blame them when they pay lipservice to the world and they rightfully should be called out for it.

Quora will give stock options to celebrities, reject a Google acquisition

January 5, 2011 / elias

It’s a private company so we may never know. But one thing that’s clear, is that the circumstances surrounding its growth are mimicking things we’ve seen in the last few years. The below are some specific thoughts on where I see Quora heading in 2011 and beyond.

1) Its growth will be driven by celebrities
A year ago, I asked if Twitter gave stock options to celebrities, which would explain the bizarre trend that had celebrities embrace the service. I’m willing to bet money they did.

Steve Case, the billionaire founder of AOL, recently has been actively answering questions on Quora, and it is awesome to see the responses. Now imagine if this domain knowledge in tech was expanded to people asking questions about celebrities? Let’s not forget Twitter started as a tech industry thing (I was told in May 2007, when I first started networking in the Sydney scene, that it was the ‘thing’ I had to have to have credibility) — it was a way to network in tech and track interesting people. Thinking back, it was transformative because successful people in tech were now accessible to new upstarts like me. In the years to follow, we saw Ashton Kutcher’s CNN race for one million followers combined with the Oprah moment, that suddenly saw it become mainstream, transformed into a way to track your favourite celebrities which is what drives its growth now.

So imagine if Quora gave stock options to all the interesting people of the world and they started answering questions? Imagine it being a direct way to interact with elected officials? Keep reading, this is not the first time we’ve seen this.

2)It will break news and information
Quora did something interesting a few months ago: it helped unravel some big news in the industry. It will do this again.

Its recognition in the mainstream (give it 2 years at least) will be if two things can occur: a massive tragedy occurs that uses Quora as a form of distributing reporting and citizen journalism; and the 2012 presidential candidates use it as a way to engage with voters. Who knows, maybe 2012 is too soon but like Twitter, it will be those two kinds of events that will make it mainstream. (For context on this, read my post from two years ago which explains the origins and rise of social media.) The service is perfectly setup to cater for both situations in a way that exceeds both the ability of Facebook and Twitter, its cousins in the social media world that is driving this broader trend in the world.

3) Google will try to buy them
Quora’s “social” competency complements Google’s lack in that area. Which ironically, is because both founders were early and senior employees of Facebook…the same reason I believe the Obama campaign led to him becoming the first social media president (as another early employee and “co-founder” of Facebook, Chris Hughes, was responsible for Obama’s Internet strategy).

Google is trying really hard to catchup on social, an area Facebook dominates and what will lead to Google losing its leadership in the industry. Despite all the rumours of its internal social networking initiatives, the numerous products launched so far have all been ordinary. And it’s for good reason: Google doesn’t get social. It can’t, it’s not in its DNA.

Google has an engineering culture where decisions are made based on data. Google’s former top designer quit because of “a design philosophy that lives or dies strictly by the sword of data”. Rather than trust the talent of its designers, it instead would over-rule decisions based on user metrics — which in a conversion business, makes sense. But the thing about user experience, its about shaping new behaviours rather than relying on existing patterns.

Which interestingly, is what Quora is excelling at: its user experience is inspiring the entire industry (like the Angel List crew, who in turn are inspiring an entire industry). That’s an impressive thing to do as a startup, and shows innovation in an area that is key to engagement — engagement that Google can’t seem to get.

4) They will decline a Google acquisition and do a licensing deal instead
Quora has very rich content, the stuff that make Google searches a lot more interesting. Google validated it is interested in the social search area with the $50 million acquisition of Aardvark. Quora in my eyes, would be a perfect fit for the same goal Google has but due to a different approach.

Google makes its money on specific types of searches, which are transactional searches — when you are looking to buy something (say a flight) as opposed to informational (like what’s the capital of Australia). But it’s always been the informational searches that drive usage of the Google search engine, as Google is a one-stop-shop for answers. Quora is like the structured blogging equivalent of Wikipedia, which is gold in the eyes of Google.

Which is why I believe they will go down the path of Twitter, which successfully played off both Google and Bing (Microsoft) with a licensing agreement to show Tweets in searches, a functionality that allowed the search engines to claim they were now “real time”. They will want to do this with Quora, because the questions on Quora mimic searches people make and the answers offer a treasure trove of curated answered by real people.

Conclusion
I could be wrong. Regardless, even if it doesn’t succeed like how I think it will, expect the startup to make a lot more noise in 2011 beyond the current cries of people saying this last week has seen a tipping point. The big blogs will continue to talk about it, and new journalists are now discovering it, only to compound my original complaint of lazy journalism.

That’s impressive and which will guarantee the noise through to 2011. That’s because all communication innovations tend to do so, and Quora is the new kid on the block that will drive that disruption.

Scouting Angel List

January 2, 2011 / elias

I’ve become an Angel List scout.

What’s Angel List? It’s a service that my good friend Naval Ravikant launched in February 2010 with the Venture Hacks crew, which is dramatically improving the process that is the tech fundraising model. Need high quality investors for a startup? All you need to do now is pitch it via a form.

What’s an Angel List scout? Someone that the Angels on Angel List can trust, who will help filter and provide social proof on startups.

Why am I an Angel List scout? I get a lot of people wanting to meet with me to discuss their startup and help them get introductions to people I know. This is partly due to my profile in building the Australian tech community, my involvement in the DataPortability Project, and my most recent initiative the StartupBus which I launched in 2010 as an entrepreneur development program and with its success I now hope to turn into a qualified community of entrepreneurs (more on that another time).

By being made a scout, I’m now going to be able to direct people to Angel List and formally provide social proof to the investors who want to know more about the startups applying. I won’t be investing in the startups that apply, but I can provide recommendations to people who will.

I don’t get paid for this. Actually, I don’t get any benefit from doing it, other than the satisfaction of helping people like future entrepreneurs and my friends at Angel List. But hopefully, I can now make my interactions with people more valuable as I have a direct connection with what I believe could transform Silicon Valley and consequently the world one day.

So if you have a pitch, go ahead and fill out the form – add my name in the referred field and they will circle back with me for my opinion (currently free-form text, but it will soon be a drop down). Also, if you want to be visible to me when applying, you have to choose me from the “angel picker” when me apply. I’ll try my best to make coffee time for as many entrepreneurs as possible who stop by San Francisco, as I have been in the last year and a half since moving to America.

Update January 2 2011: I just got told that “as a scout, you can see, vote, and comment on startups that have chosen to be visible to you. So you do have some real powers in influencing the investors on the site and crowdvoting up the good startups”. So once again I can’t *do* anything that will get you funded, but I can help 🙂

The new magazine

December 22, 2010 / elias

The Facebook homescreen is a remarkable thing. I just saw a video of a friend throwing food at birds; relatives taking pictures of themselves in a hot tub; a link to a mind-expanding article; and a status message that made me laugh. It made me think: the homescreen is the new magazine.

Sure, we can be simplistic with this and say lots of pictures and content makes thee a magazine. But what strikes me as fascinating is how much personal content is shared. People’s thoughts, insight into their lives, and the real-time autobiographical dictation by our “friends”. It makes me think of the fascination people have with celebrities, and how gossip magazines are some of the highest grossing of their kind. The same phenomenon is being exploited here — which is people want to know more about people they know. While with celebrities you could potentially say people do it due to a fixation on celebrity status and looks, I would argue the reason gossip magazines are so popular is due to the curiousity into the lives of people who are familiar. People would be equally fascinated with a magazine about celebrities as a magazine of their neighbours, if it was practical.

It’s almost like Facebook’s homescreen is the new media version of a publication. But of your friends. And like a glossy magazine. Of original content from otherwise hard-to-obtain situations.

Or more practically speaking, like a gossip magazine of your neighbours.

Delicious will go down as one of the great tragedies

December 17, 2010 / elias

As Marshall Kirkpatrick eloquently wrote, I’m also another person disappointed that Yahoo! is shutting down Delicious, the social bookmarking site that helped generate the Web 2.0 trend. But this reflects a deeper problem at Yahoo.

How Yahoo’s spreadsheets miss the point
As a “heavy” user myself, it may be ironic to say that I never visit the site; I often will not bookmark a site for month’s. And yet, it hits me like a shot to the heart to hear that it will be shut down. Why? Because it’s so valuable to me. The amount of times I’ve been able to rediscover content I’ve previously read has alone made it valuable — the tagging innovation that Del.icio.us pioneered makes my search for hard-to-recall content much more efficient. But there was even a time, where the most popular links of delicious were my homepage: the quality of the content being shared justified my daily attention in the same way other aggregators have to me like how techmeme.com have.

In fact, I’ve recently rediscovered this as I experiment with the Rockmelt browser, and I check the most popular links via the widget on the side of my browser.

But notice how I don’t visit the website? I might see what links are popular, but that doesn’t mean I will click on them. I don’t visit the actual delicious website and so the metrics the Yahoo management are reviewing are skewed. If advertising is on the site (the only type of revenue model attempted), it would not convert much. They believe no one is using the service, but the truth is, they are.

I never thought the “network” operating model could suffer due to the fact metrics measuring value can’t be quantified. So it’s completely reasonable why a Yahoo management team thinks it time to shut down this service: low on traffic, low on revenue. Numbers in the spreadsheet say this is a loss: let’s kill it, says the MBA.

What we have here though is a management team who not only are out of touch with how people use delicious (potentially because they don’t get the vision that only the founder truly gets — and he’s long gone), but more important, completely misunderstand how to capture the value of this valuable asset (not property). As a point in comparison, Yahoo acquired the other Web2.0 darling Flickr, which is a service I also have been using for over 5 years. And when I say using, I mean a paying customer that has paid his subscription without hesitation every year (which I will note, there are not many services I pay for which makes this even more impressive). Like Delicious, I store data with Flickr that I may not use for a while — but the way it manages my data has become an invaluable tool for my life.

I worry more about Yahoo and any company it acquires
Yahoo’s management should have implemented a subscription model like Flickr, because it’s obvious that a “book marking” site will never get a lot of a traffic (you can book mark sites without having to need to visit delicious.com). Tools like this don’t make money from traffic; and network business models like this generate value beyond the confines of the web property.
With the news breaking, it will now force an action. Either sell it to people who have now seen their cards (in fact, I’ve had friends of mine not in tech ask me how can they put an offer for this!), open-source it (like how Google reacted when etherpad was going to be shut down), or shut it down as they said they want to and lose the opportunity to capture its value. Of course, they could publicly announce they won’t shut it down, but everyone now knows what they think and it will kill the service due to new users being paranoid about their data. Yahoo! gains nothing with this.

But the sad thing about this, is that it’s forced them to ignore the opportunity of potentially being more innovative with the revenue model. And because they failed to do this, this impacts the company more generally — monetisation is key to sustainability and if you have a management that can’t do that (which presumably, is the reason it’s being shut down), then there’s something even more wrong with this new age media company that as Jeff Jarvis has called, has become the last old-media company.

Yahoo is an amazing company, and companies need to make tough decisions sometimes to grow the company. But not understanding the potential of Delicious will go down in web history as one of the great tragedies — and if Yahoo sells it, one of its biggest blunders.

Update: And just as I clicked “save” on this post, the Delicious blog posted saying they are now going to “sell” it as it’s not a strategic fit, which as I mentioned in my post was one of the likely outcomes. So if it’s not a strategic fit, it begs the question again, what is Yahoo?

On Google and Facebook

November 12, 2010 / elias

Mike Melanson interviewed me today over the whole Facebook vs Google standoff. He wrote a nice piece that I recommend you read, but I thought I would expand on what I was quoted on to give my full perspective.

To me, there is a bigger picture battle here, and it’s for us to see true data interoperability on the Internet, of which this is but a minor battle in the bigger war.

I see a strong parallel to global trade and data portability on the web. Like in the days of restrictive trade tariffs that have been progressively demolished with globalisation, the ‘protectionism’ being cried out by each party of protecting their users is but a hollow attempt to satisfy their voters in the short-term, which are the shareholders of each company. This tit-for-tat approach is what governments still practice with trade and people-travel restrictions, but which at the end of the day hurts individuals in the short-term but society as a whole in the longer term. It doesn’t help anyone but give companies (and as we’ve seen historically, governments) a short term sigh of relief.

You only have to look at Australia, which went from having some of the highest trade tariffs in the world in the ’70s to being one of the most open economies in the world by the ’90s. The effect of this is that it made it one of the most competitive economies in the world, which is part of the reason that of all the OECD countries during the recent financial crisis, it managed to be the only economy not to fall into recession. Companies, like the economies governments try to protect, need to be able to react to their market to survive, and they can only do that successfully in the long term by being truly competitive.

The reality is, Facebook and Google are hurting the global information network, as true value unlocks when we have a peered privacy-respecting interoperability network. The belief that value is interpreted as who holds the most data, is a mere attempt to buy time for their true competitive threat — the broader battle for interoperability — which will expose them to compete not on the data they acquired but on their core value as a web service to use that data. These companies need to recognise what their true comparative advantage is and what they can do with that data.

Google and Facebook have improved a lot over the years with regards to data portability, but they continue to make the mistake (if not in words, but in actions) — that locking in the data is the value. Personal information acquired by companies loses value with time — people’s jobs, locations, and even email accounts — change over time and are no longer relevant. What a site really wants is persistent access to a person so they can tap into the more recently updated data, for whatever they need. What Google and Facebook are doing is really hurting them as they would benefit by working together. Having a uniform way of transferring data between their information network silo’s ensures privacy-respecting ways that minimise the risk for the consumer (which they claim to be protecting) and the liberalisation of the data economy means they can in the long term focus on their comparative advantage with the same data.

Billion dollar brainwaves

October 8, 2010 / elias

My Small Business | Tips & Advice For Small Business in Australia

David Wilson, a journalist for Fairfax, approached me the other month to give him my thoughts of Silicon Valley. The resulting interview appeared on Fairfax’s online mastheads (which include The Age, the Sydney Morning Herald, and the Brisbane Times). The article had more focus on me than I expected, but Wilson still captures some important lessons I’ve learned since moving here.

One that is mentioned is the importance of not planning. I’m a big believer that you can’t plan your life (or your business). To put it simply, using yesterday’s information to make decisions about tomorrow is just not as effective as using the most recent information and reacting. Check out the very successful and intelligent Jason Fried of 37 Signals who says something similar:

So it’s not about the big plan, it’s about a day by day by day by day and seeing where things go and just kind of making decisions as we go.

And the main reason why I think this is important is because people often make decisions with the wrong information. So they make decisions far into the future, based on information they have today. You’re better off making decisions today based on information you have today because that’s when you make your best decisions. You make your best decisions when you have the best information. That’s always right now.

Another lesson I’m learning but which I didn’t mention, is that capitalism — effective capitalism — is brutal. It’s something I’ve observed with successful business people in Australia and America and I’m still trying to collect my thoughts about it. For example, employees and their termination — I’ve had several people explain to me the difficulty they’ve experienced doing it, which is for the better of the business.

To put this in context, loyalty and personality should not be confused as performance (which really, is the point of the employment). And if you’re not performing (or the broader function you are a part of), there’s the door. Brutal, I know — but what’s more brutal is a business collapsing and everyone losing their jobs. Effective capitalism isn’t about protecting an individuals ‘entitlement’ to a job; it’s about evolving the entitlement of an enterprise so that it can continue to sustain itself.

About