07 little bets

A lecture by Melih Arat – melarat.blogspot.com

PETER SIMS is the coauthor with Bill George of the Wall Street Journal

and BusinessWeek bestselling book True North. His work has been

featured in the Harvard Business Review, Fortune, and TechCrunch

and he is a contributor to the Reuters and Harvard Business Review

blogs.

Little BetsHow Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries

Peter Sims



The most successful entrepreneurs don’t begin with brilliant ideas-they discover them.


Mark Zuckerberg / Facebook


Michael and Larry Jordan


Google

• Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s first goal was to solve a small problem: How to prioritize library searches online.

• Ad words: goto.com / overture.com

• Adwords allows advertisers to display ads next to spesific search terms, such as “flowers” or ”seminar”


Amazon

• Amazon Auctions – eBay Competition– Launched in 1999 and

shut down in 2000

• To many unsuccessful attempts

• Amazon Web Services for Third Party Vendors– 30 % of Amazon sales

come from AWS.


Beethoven Would Be A copy-cat

• Beethoven would be a cheap imitation of Mozart, if he wouldn’t explore new styles and forms.

• His surviving manuscripts are riddled with pockmarks, corrections, and changes.


Saras Sarasvathy / University of Virginia

• What makes Entrepreneurs Entrepreneurial?

• A survey• Entrepreneurs ranging USD 200

million to 6,5 billion.• Managers with MBA degrees• The problem is to cook a meal.• Managers with MBA degrees

sticked to the recipes, shop for the ingredients

• Entrepreneurs just improvised with what is available at that time.

• Manager tried to avoid mistakes

• Entrepreneurs were open to mistakes and surprises.


Hasso Platner Institute of Design


The Problem of General Motors

• Sequential Processes• Detailed planning


Tyranny of large numbers or bigger bets

• Looking at opportunities already billion dollar markets

• HP’s first scientific calculator –HP35 for 400 USD in, 1972.

• No market research just experiment

• HP buying Compaq


The War and Planning

• Robert McNamara, about the Vietnam War

• “War is so complex it’s beyond the ability of the human mind to comprehend all the variables.


The Affordable Loss Principle

• Determine in advance what you are willing to lose

• Rather than calculating expected gains.


Falling Quickly To Learn Fast

• Make it wrong asap; so you can make it right.

• Obama Campaign


experiment

• experiment: learn by doing. fail quickly to learn fast. develop experiments and prototypes to gather insights, identify problems, and build up to creative ideas, like beethoven did in order to discover new musical styles and forms.


play

• play: a playful, improvisational, and humorous atmosphere quiets our inhibitions when ideas are incubating or newly hatched, and prevents creative ideas from being snuffed out or prematurely judged.


Immerse / Engage Deeply

• immerse: take time to get out into the world to gather fresh ideas and insights, in order to understand deeper human motivations and desires, and absorb how things work from the ground up.


define

• define: use insights gathered throughout the process to define specific problems and needs before solving them, just as the google founders did when they realized that their library search algorithm could address a much larger problem.


reorient

• reorient: be flexible in pursuit of larger goals and aspirations, making good use of small wins to make necessary pivots and chart the course to completion.


iterate

• iterate: repeat, refine, and test frequently armed with better insights, information, and assumptions as time goes on, as chris rock does to perfect his act.

07 little bets

Technology

Transcript of 07 little bets