The Digital Economist
Hi, I'm Sam Birmingham. I love startups, innovation and challenging the status quo.
For the vast majority of my years, economies have grown, companies have profited and people have got richer on the back of a once-in-a-lifetime demographic shift and debt-fuelled boom. Those days are through.
Economies must evolve beyond rampant consumerism and confront the demographic headwind that had been a tailwind until the Baby Boomers began retiring. Companies must become nimble, innovate and invent new products to address customers' ever-changing needs in this digitally-disrupted world. And as people, we must focus on solving problems and learn to do more with less.
These are the challenges that excite me. They are what I want to get out of bed each morning and be a part of. This is where I share my thoughts.
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“have been arguing for the last year and a half that impressive advances in computer technology—from improved industrial robotics to automated...”
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A ‘startup’ is a company that is confused about - 1. What its product is, 2. Who its customers are. 3. How to make money.
- Dave McClure
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Dream Machine - Mark Farina
i was sitting in a framing store yesterday waiting for the gotham gal to finish what she was doing. this song came on....
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Impressive stats from 1871, a co-working space in Chicago.
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“Everyone should meditate once a day. And if you don’t have time to meditate then you should do it twice a day”— Sanjiv Chopra
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“Startups focus on high value activities. As a company matures, 80-90% of time goes to operational factors, not innovation.”
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“Many think of management as cutting deals and laying people off and hiring people and buying and selling companies. That’s not management, that’s...”
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This is the best thing I’ve seen all week:
LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy on dealing with failure
“I was really a failure. Like, really really really, really, really really really a failure… Not even an epic failure, just sort of like a sad, pathetic failure.
A real epic failure you can get behind. Like ‘I tried this big thing, and it failed, and I lost everything’. No, I just kind of frittered my years away doing nothing…
I didn’t take responsibility for much. I kind of just felt bad for myself and wondered why my life wasn’t better and stuff like that…”
(Eventually) I started realising that - it wasn’t because I was lazy - I was just really afraid of failing… I was claiming safety in doing nothing.”
Confrontingly honest and refreshing humble.
For many entrepreneurs “raising money” has replaced “building a sustainable business” as their goal. That’s a big mistake. When you take money from investors their business model becomes yours.
I would go further than this.
As I explained in a talk earlier this week, the biggest problem with taking money is that your focus shifts from your customers to your shareholders.
Data should do three things:
- Confirm or disprove what you were already thinking.
- Make you ask more of the right questions.
- Cause you to act on what you discover.
The power of data isn’t in the information.It’s what you do with it that matters.
Lean Startup, anyone?
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them”
Albert Einstein
“There are Michael Jordans out there. You’re probably not one of them. Learn how to fucking pass.”
“When you step away from the prepackaged structure of traditional education, you’ll discover that there are many more ways to learn outside school than within.”
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Gurus will say what you can’t do or must do. They mean well, but they’re wrong.
For every rule they tell you, there’s an exception. They are just telling you their specific past, not your specific future.
There are no rules in this game. You change them as you go.
”“I see much deeper and broader reasons for learning to code. In the process of learning to code, people learn many other things. They are not just learning to code, they are coding to learn.”
“We need to be in the open mode when pondering a problem — but! — once we come up with a solution, we must then switch to the closed mode to implement it. Because once we’ve made a decision, we are efficient only if we go through with it decisively, undistracted by doubts about its correctness.”
John Cleese
“You can only make money by being right about something that most people think is wrong”
Bill Gurley, as quoted in Fred Wilson’s blog Return and Ridicule
