Business

My goal was simply attracting large numbers of customers because mass appeal guarantees profit. I often advised not to obsess over immediate profits but to prioritise popularity. Like Amazon or Apple, success comes from creating something that garners mass recognition and love.

Take any product and change the identity of the person or entity associated with it, and you fundamentally change how the world interprets and values that product. The product itself is 100% identical—it hasn't changed at all. What has changed is the identity, and in particular, the status of the person attached to it.

In markets like books, art, music, and Hollywood, it's extremely hard to predict which products will become runaway hits. In the early days, if a high-status person embraces a product, it can have an enormous impact on its trajectory. Influential people adopt and endorse a product, which gives it an initial push.

There is an honest trade-off between labour market protection and learning. If you have an extremely static labour market—like the high protection laws in France or Spain—you get stability, but you sacrifice learning. There is less transfer of knowledge because there is less reallocation of people to tasks or teams.

Director of MIT Media Lab; expert in network science and complexity

The number one thing is misread intentions. You assume someone has ill intent toward you—maybe to hurt you, harm you, or make you feel uncomfortable—and you don't check in on those intentions. Then a narrative forms in your head, and that's when you start spiralling. You can apply this to your children, to relationships, and it happens constantly at work.

Author & Leading Expert on the Sharing Economy & Collaborative Consumption

The idea that Google or Meta weren't American companies was a fiction they liked to tell themselves. It just simply wasn't true. And I'll tell you why: physically, their servers are in actual places.

There's a compelling mission—both because of the enormous economic opportunity it represents, if it succeeds, and because of the broader impact it can have on the world. The mission is defined by a stubborn technical challenge. It has to be hard. No one wants to work on something that isn't difficult, and in a sense, choosing the hardest problems becomes a moat.

At Axiom we've raised $64 million—we're a small startup—and we recently won the Putnam competition. We scored 90 out of 120, which would have placed us above all ~4,000 human contestants last year and at the level of a Putnam Fellow, meaning top five in the world. If you tried to achieve that purely through informal methods—where hallucination is a persistent risk—getting to the same level of consistent correctness would likely require a lot more resources.

At Colossal, we are not going to work in humans or non-human primates because we felt like we're already going to have an uphill battle with transparency and education, and we don't want people to be like, if a hair-loss treatment comes out of Colossal, 'are they selling a gene from a woolly mammoth?'

From day one, we said that we wanted to create value, create impact, and create inspiration. We're not going to build a business that just creates impact—we're not a nonprofit. We're not going to just create a company that inspires the next generation. We have to create value.

What the 1% of SMEs in a region that can really grow desperately need is local risk finance. We can think of this as venture capital. But we need venture capital that will work for SMEs, and that means it's got to be locally based. We've got a lot of venture capital, but it's nearly all in London and the Southeast.

Economist specializing in poverty, conflict, and development in Africa

When the Sheffield steel industry collapsed, incomes collapsed, and so demand in the region collapsed—businesses of all sorts, not just steel but shops and businesses that sold things to consumers. The consumers were poorer, and so businesses started to fail. Investment didn't flow into this region saying 'oh good, a depressed region.' It flowed out to the places which were booming.

Economist specializing in poverty, conflict, and development in Africa

If you get the culture right, most of the other stuff — including building your brand to be about the very best customer service — will happen naturally on its own. But if you don't get the culture right, then you're not going to accomplish any of the other stuff.

CEO of Zappos & Pioneer of Company Culture & Happiness

The vision for Zappos was for it to be about the very best customer service and for the Zappos brand to be synonymous with the very best customer service. In order to do that, we had to build a culture where employees genuinely wanted to provide great customer service — where it wasn't a department, but a way of being.

CEO of Zappos & Pioneer of Company Culture & Happiness

Our philosophy has been about trying to control the entire customer experience. A lot of people, when they think about branding, they think about advertising and marketing. But we actually don't do any advertising or marketing. Instead, we invest all of that money into the customer experience, and then our customers do our marketing for us through word of mouth.

CEO of Zappos & Pioneer of Company Culture & Happiness

We formalized making sure that the company culture and the employee happiness was priority number one, and everything else — including profits, revenue growth, and so on — was a byproduct of getting the culture right. Because our whole belief was that if we get the culture right, then most of the other stuff, including building our brand to be about the very best customer service, will happen naturally on its own.

CEO of Zappos & Pioneer of Company Culture & Happiness