How to achieve success in 2007

Sergey Brin (Sergey Brin)
Google co-founder.

Aim for simplicity.
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Simplicity is what we strive for. Technology is becoming more complex, and simplicity was one of the reasons why people pulled Google. The excessive complexity of network tools, various devices and computers is a problem that is necessary, but very difficult to solve. Success comes with simplicity. Look at Apple, their work and their achievements.

We focus on opportunities, not on the number of products. We just do not continue to work on what life can become complicated. We do not need 20 products with 20 ways of working. I was lost on our site when I tried to track absolutely everything. It is better to have a small number of products that share the same functions.

Chris DeWolfe
Co-founder of Myspace.

Let social networks be social.

The most important thing is to stay true to what is valuable in the eyes of your community. You can’t just impose yourself on people and try to sell something that they don’t need - this is generally good advice for merchants, but especially for sites based on community such as MySpace. You need to find a way to somehow improve the lives of people, but that would not contradict your essence.

Rachel Ray
Chef, writer and entrepreneur.

Turn your passion into an empire.

Be open to new opportunities. Use them without thinking whether they will bring you money or not. For five years I conducted the “Dish for 30 Minutes” program on the local TV channel, and for the first two years I was not paid for it. Then I began to receive $ 50 for the transfer. I spent more on gasoline and groceries, but I liked working on this show and appearing on the screen in the houses of TV viewers every week, and so I didn’t quit despite all the costs.

I also realized that you cannot be everything to all people. If you are successful in some way, then let it be your main goal. In my case, this is accessibility. All my products should be available, affordable for people. The price of olive oil, the recipe of which we develop together with Colavita, will be set to compete with any available olive oil. We are going to sell our butter in supermarkets of economy class, and not expensive stores, because most of our viewers buy products there. Our pots and pans should be strong and with a thick bottom, but remain affordable. Find something of your own and hold on to it. My brand is largely based on my daily life.

Richard Branson
Founder and head of the Virgin group of companies.

Learn to say "no" (even if you are known as the most trouble-free person).

It is often very difficult for me to refuse a person, because often the people to whom I say “no” are those people whom I don’t want to disappoint. But it should be difficult. Saying “no” is not an easy task, and you should have innate abilities to it. Before, I often avoided doing it myself and hid behind other people, instructing them to speak for me, but if you are the boss, then this is wrong.

I remember when, at the age of fifteen, I asked Vanessa Redgrave and James Baldwin (James Baldwin) for an interview, and the fact that they took the time to answer meant incredibly much to me. It inspired me. Therefore, if you are at the head, it is extremely important to respond to people and support them. And even if in fact you refuse them, if you have to say no, whether it’s about work, advertising, or the idea that you are offered, take the time to do it yourself.

I recently met two big businessmen from San Francisco who said that when they receive similar offers by email, they simply send them to the trash. I asked them why, and they replied: "We could use the time we spend on answering to do something valuable for business." Perhaps from a practical point of view, they are right, but I still think that this is not correct from a moral point of view. And I suspect that everything that is wrong from a moral point of view ultimately hurts a business.

Howard Schultz
Chairman of the Starbucks Board of Directors.

Do not be afraid to be an entrepreneur for people.

Over the past 10-15 years, the rules of the game regarding brand building have changed significantly. Where companies once spread their influence through traditional marketing, regular customers of the company now seek a strong emotional relationship with it. At the heart of this relationship is the most important distinguishing feature of a world-class brand: trust. Trust your employees and trust your customers.

Earlier, we tried our best to exceed the expectations of our customers. But we knew that to achieve this goal, we must first exceed the expectations of our employees. It was more than ever evident in 1990, when we were still a private company that had not yet become profitable. It was then that we began to provide
comprehensive medical care to all of our employees, including those who worked part-time. We also firmly believed that our people should share the success of Starbucks through stock purchase options - “bean stocks,” as we called them. It may be difficult to imagine that we uphold such a costly idea, developing our business. But these were not expenses, but rather investments.

Rapid growth can make a lot of mistakes invisible, and cause a heady feeling that makes it sometimes difficult to see the need for investment for the future. Imagine investing in your company as if you were building a hundred floors — you first need to lay a solid foundation that will support future growth.

Chad Hurley (Chad Hurley)
Co-founder of YouTube.

Give your startup the opportunity to compete for life.

1. Immediately subject to verification. Launch your product or service before you receive funding. See how people react to it before giving a PowerPoint presentation and drawing up a business plan - give people what they can use and go for it.
2. Listen to user reviews. Starting the development, do not think that you know all the answers. Listen to the user community and change your product to them. We had a lot of ideas about how our service should be developed. Coming out of PayPal and eBay, we presented YouTube as a good way to add video to auctions, but nobody used our development in this way, so we didn’t add support for this feature.
3. Give your partners what they need. Talk with your business partners about ideas that are clear to them, and try to agree to their demands. An interesting example is our collaboration with music studios. In the case of Warner and other studios, we saw an opportunity to protect their copyrights and create a new market. Now we can, for example, add music to travel videos. This gives users the freedom to create and do it legally.

Kevin Rose
Digg co-founder.

Let the users themselves conduct it.

The idea of ​​letting users manage your site may seem daunting at first. From the first day we asked ourselves: “What will be on the main page today?”. And you have absolutely no idea what it will be. But, if you take it back, the idea of ​​giving control to the hands of users attracted more and more people to the site. They have a feeling that they own something and discover something new. If you give users the opportunity to share things that are interesting to them, they will use it to talk about what is important to them.

We have 17 employees and 4,500 articles are sent to the site every day. We could hire more people, but the site was not made for that. It was created to allow the users themselves to determine how they should be and follow them themselves.

Steward Butterfield (Stewart Butterfield)
Co-founder of Flickr.

Not only money matters.

One of the biggest lessons for me is that there must be a reason why you do something. You really should like what you do. Business should be based on some idea. This does not mean that it should not be related to profit, but if this is the only reason why you work, it usually does not bring success. For a company to be profitable, you need confident employees, satisfied customers, and reliable suppliers. Working here, I want to achieve something. All Flickr employees are dedicated to their work, because they are the eyes of the whole world. Otherwise, I would just say: “To hell with it!” And went to sunbathe on the beach.

Brad Anderson (Brad Anderson)
Chief Executive Officer Best Buy.

Use gender equality for your own purposes.

Women are changing the rules of the game in the consumer electronics market. Each year, they spend on these products more than 55 million dollars and in 90 percent of cases they affect the decision to purchase. Only a madman would not pay attention to it. Therefore, the question is what changes will you make to make your company more attractive for such an important group of customers.

What is the easiest way to do this? Pay attention to what thousands of women in your company think. They are a real treasure for you. Most companies do not notice what employees are thinking. But they would really like to be listened to, and they want to do business better. In our case, this means that the staff of our stores should reflect our community. That is, half of all employees in the store should be women - the goal to which Best Buy is still striving. And indeed, you can see a significant increase in income from those stores that observe an approximately equal ratio of men and women in the state.

Philip Roseddale (Philip Rosedale)
Founder and CEO of Linden Lab.

Discover real life in a virtual economy.

As a futurist, I think it is very possible that the monetary circulation around virtual objects or characters will exceed the turnover in similar areas of the real world. When your avatar looks like a Hollywood movie star, and when you work on your character in such detail that you can see every tattoo, scratch, nose ring and even skin pores, it’s likely that people will become more attached to their character than own body, because it is much easier to change. But there are people who have lost weight or improved their physical condition as a result of playing in Second Life. Can you believe it? Second Life is very plastic. Your environment and the world around you are so easy to edit that it creates an inner feeling that you can do it in real life. There are even a lot of jokes on this subject. One guy said, "Because of this game, I lost 30 kg!", And I immediately sent him a message: "It can not be!". He replied: “I have been working as a designer in Second Life for two years now. I made buildings, and every day I changed my avatar. After two years, I said to myself that if it is so easy to change the avatar, it must be that it is not so difficult to do and truly. ” The world in Second Life is so easy to change. It is so flexible that it causes addiction. Is it contagious. And you also begin to look at the real world: “Why don't I paint these walls?”

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