07 little bets
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Little BetsA lecture by Melih AratTRANSCRIPT
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
A lecture by Melih Arat – melarat.blogspot.com
A lecture by Melih Arat – melarat.blogspot.com
The most successful entrepreneurs don’t begin with brilliant ideas-they discover them.
A lecture by Melih Arat – melarat.blogspot.com
Mark Zuckerberg / Facebook
A lecture by Melih Arat – melarat.blogspot.com
Michael and Larry Jordan
A lecture by Melih Arat – melarat.blogspot.com
• 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”
A lecture by Melih Arat – melarat.blogspot.com
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.
A lecture by Melih Arat – melarat.blogspot.com
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.
A lecture by Melih Arat – melarat.blogspot.com
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.
A lecture by Melih Arat – melarat.blogspot.com
Hasso Platner Institute of Design
A lecture by Melih Arat – melarat.blogspot.com
The Problem of General Motors
• Sequential Processes• Detailed planning
A lecture by Melih Arat – melarat.blogspot.com
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
A lecture by Melih Arat – melarat.blogspot.com
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.
A lecture by Melih Arat – melarat.blogspot.com
The Affordable Loss Principle
• Determine in advance what you are willing to lose
• Rather than calculating expected gains.
A lecture by Melih Arat – melarat.blogspot.com
A lecture by Melih Arat – melarat.blogspot.com
Falling Quickly To Learn Fast
• Make it wrong asap; so you can make it right.
• Obama Campaign
A lecture by Melih Arat – melarat.blogspot.com
A lecture by Melih Arat – melarat.blogspot.com
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.
A lecture by Melih Arat – melarat.blogspot.com
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.
A lecture by Melih Arat – melarat.blogspot.com
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.
A lecture by Melih Arat – melarat.blogspot.com
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.
A lecture by Melih Arat – melarat.blogspot.com
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.
A lecture by Melih Arat – melarat.blogspot.com
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.