Out of left field

"After graduating, Dalio went to Harvard Business School, where he traded commodities—grains, oil, cotton, and so on—for his own account. Not long after leaving Harvard, he landed at Shearson Hayden Stone, the brokerage firm run by Sanford Weill. Dalio worked in the commodity-futures department, advising cattle ranchers, grain producers, and others on how to hedge risks. (The horns of a longhorn steer, the gift of some California ranchers, are mounted behind his desk.)

On New Year’s Eve in 1974, Dalio went out drinking with his departmental boss, got into a disagreement, and slugged him. About the same time, at the annual convention of the California Food & Grain Growers’ Association, he paid an exotic dancer to drop her cloak in front of the crowd.

After being fired, he persuaded some of his clients to hire him as a consultant and founded Bridgewater, operating it out of his two-bedroom apartment. He was twenty-six years old."

Read the New Yorker profile of Ray Dalio here.

The Secret to Success

J: And to make sure I didn’t miss anything, is there any other question I should have asked you?

R: Yes: “What advice do you have for people who want to get where you’re at?” And the answer is, from the outside everybody thinks that being good at something, or getting places, or being an independent contractor, or whatever your dream may be is really easy or that it’s just natural.

And I would say: hard work. I think that people have lost the art of super hard work, really focusing on something, working really hard and sacrificing while doing it. I think that’s probably my motto for success. Maybe I’m not as good a designer as others, which is pretty obvious. But what I lack in skill, I think I make up for in hard work and really trying to figure things out.

Read the rest of Rogie's excellent interview here (via Chris Lee).

A Spark Lights a Big Fire

One of the things I love about Silicon Valley is that someone can go from a nobody to a superstar almost instantly. That's *not* possible at this sort of scale and consistency anywhere else in the world. For one of my personal anecdotes, check out the beginning of this email thread with Evan Reas (CEO of LikeALittle) from last fall:

Of course Evan was hustling and sending an email after we were replying to each other on Twitter but the point is that back then he was a complete "nobody" ;)

Now he's gone on to raise millions, LAL is a hot startup in the valley with great traction, and it seems like they have a pretty big opportunity in front of them with a top-notch team. As long as they just don't fuck it up.

Silicon Valley does a good job getting out of the way of "nobodies" because out here it's close to a pure meritocracy. Like a forest that's incredibly dry, all it takes is a small spark to light a tremendous fire. And of course in this analogy, a big fire is a very good thing. What's important is that this could probably only happen out in Silicon Valley.

In Silicon Valley it seems that the top talent, even if they're "nobody", more often than not finds a way to bubble up towards the top.

What Google+ Could Learn From Coca-Cola

The rapidly growing lemon soda market was initially dominated by 7 Up and it wasn't for a long period of time until Coca-Cola's entrant, Sprite, took a dominant position in this segment [1].

Of course, Coca-Cola had an incredible brand even in the 1960's when they introduced Sprite to the market. It wasn't for a relatively long time until Sprite took over as the market leader in the late 70's.

Now imagine if Coca-Cola had used the power of their brand to name Sprite something else, perhaps utilizing Coca-Cola in the name, in spite of their core product differences [2]. You have to admit that would be kind of tempting, and while I'm not a brilliant marketer, perhaps they would have gone with Coca-Cola Clear Lemon-Lime, Coca-Cola Lemon-Lime, Coca-Cola Clear Lemon, or something else.

That would have been an awful mistake. And I see Google making the same mistake with Google+. Google is a search company; Facebook is a personal social network [3]. When I see Google+, I just think about how Google is using their new social product to augment their search/ads business. Perhaps if I had seen Google+ launch their product as plus.com (Google could just outright buy the company that owns plus.com) then I would have thought that Google was entirely committed to creating a social network. Or if I had seen a creative, stand-alone domain instead of plus.google.com or google.com/plus, I would have thought the same thing.

Getting the name of a new product right has to come before any innovations on UI, product, technology, and so forth.

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[1] Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprite_(soft_drink)

[2] Even though Sprite is transparent, has no caffeine, and has a pretty different flavor from Coca-Cola Classic.

[3] And Coca-Cola is a marketing company. Perhaps that's why they got the Sprite name right in the first place.

Thanks to Guillermo for brainstorming this post and reading drafts.