The Upstarts by Brad Stone

The Upstarts by Brad Stone was an interesting book on Uber and Airbnb, two still privately held companies that in the past decade have become behemoths in their respective spaces.

Stone is a Businessweek writer who also previously wrote The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon and while having The Upstarts be on two companies felt at times to make it harder as a reader to get a consistent flow from the book than was the case with that on Amazon, it also made sense to include both as Uber and Airbnb very much linked in their dual reliance on sharing economies and similar paths to success.

Stone details very well the founding stories of each company, with Airbnb from CEO Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nathan Blecharczyk, and how they early got attention Selling Obama O's and Cap'n McCains cereal around the 2008 Presidential election. This helped them get into the Y Combinator startup school in Silicon Valley as the story and mental toughness it showed impressed Paul Graham, the program's co-founder who told them "you guys are like cockroaches, you just won't die."

Uber was started by Garrett Camp, who made money from founding StumbleUpon then became interested in the idea of transportation and the woeful taxi industry in San Francisco, and Ryan Graves and now CEO Travis Kalanick joined early on. The company started out with licensed town cars delivering a premium service and then moved from being about luxury to more about time and convenience. Price also is an interesting factor around Uber's growth, with how Uber would utilize dynamic customer pricing to entice more drivers.

Stone wrote that while Chesky as CEO of Airbnb known as having a less publicly adversarial approach than Kalanick, both are fiercely competitive leaders and two huge factors leading to the success of each company have been fund raising and public demand. Each has raised huge amounts of money and it was interesting reading of how initial investments made by people would get diluted through later fund raising. In terms of public demand, especially Uber found footing through the sheer force of people wanting the service and the success of each company has been in part from building momentum and public will to overcome legal hurdles.

The story of Airbnb and Uber up to present day is a fascinating one well told by Stone and makes me think back to writing that I did on each years ago, with a May 2011 post on a Fast Company Sharing Economy piece on Airbnb and other firms and an April 2012 post on an interview with early Uber investor Chris Sacca that noted the hustle of Ryan Graves.

Fast Company writing - on AirBnB, Google X, Preet Bharara & All Power Labs

Some interesting Fast Company Magazine writing from recent issues included looks at Google X, Airbnb, the Berkeley-based energy startup All Power Labs and U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara.

The first piece to note here was by Jon Gertner with "The Truth About Google X: An Exclusive Look Behind the Secretive Lab's Closed Doors" and it brought to mind a Businessweek feature on Google X that I linked to and wrote on a year ago.

A story written by Austin Carr was "Inside Airbnb's Grand Hotel Plans" and it included lots of interesting content on CEO Brian Chesky and newly named head of global hospitality Chip Conley.

On U.S. Attorney Bharara, Max Chafkin wrote "The Most Dangerous Man in Bitcoin Isn't a Criminal," with a part of the story that stood out to me being mention of Bharara having hired Palo Alto-based data mining company Palantir.

The final piece to note here was by Josh Dean with "Meet the Radical Berkeley Artist Whose Company is Turning Trash Into Electricity" on Jim Mason whose company All Power Labs makes the Power Pallet that works through a process called gassification.

Fast Company Mar 2012 "50 Most Innovative Companies" Issue

There was a bunch of interesting content from the March edition of Fast Company Magazine. It was the annual "50 Most Innovative Companies" issue and below are the businesses and associated writing that stood out (doesn't discount the companies on the full list not noted here, just that I didn't read anything on them that was terribly new to me)...

#5 - Square: There was a fairly lengthy profile of founder Jack Dorsey done by Ellen McGirt. It's well written and interesting content on a fascinating guy (Dorsey also co-founded Twitter) and company doing incredibly well in the fortified barriers to entry financial services industry.

#12 - Southern New Hampshire University: Excellent feature piece done by Anya Kamenetz about online education offerings from the traditional not for profit university.

#13 - Jawbone: Interesting profile from Farhad Manjoo on the consumer electronics maker noted as "one of the hottest private companies in the world."

#19 - Airbnb: Another long piece, this one by Austin Carr, on the successful vacation (but, not exclusively) rental facilitation company. That description sure leaves something to be desired so fortunately the Carr story details well Airbnb and its design-centric focus.

#24 - Starbucks: Featured was an excellent look by Jon Gertner at the company and how its returned to success by focusing less on simple replication expansion and more on performance and innovation. Also of interest from the piece was mention of future growth into the area of health and wellness.

#29 - Red Bull Media House: Red Bull an interesting company in the unconventional way its grown in part through extreme sports affiliation and Teressa Iezzi details in this profile its extension of sports sponsorship to a content division.

#34 - Chipotle: Interesting profile by Danielle Sacks on the fast food company with detail beyond what I've seen about efforts around an organic, sustainable and humane food supply. Mention also made of a Chipotle YouTube video with now 6M views.

#41 - Kickstarter: Probably the shortest piece of those I've highlighted, but still an interesting one by Rachel Arndt on the platform being more and more heavily used for funding creative ventures (noted in the piece that 17 Sundance films used Kickstarter).

Fast Company Pieces - 3M Design Chief / Serial Entrepreneurship / Ads on the Web

Three different stories from the past few months of Fast Company that stood out as being on interesting companies and/or business topics.

From the recent November 2011 issue came Bill Nguyen: The Boy In The Bubble on the founder (or co-founder) of at least four different startups, including Lala (sold to Apple) and now the much talked about, but uncertain as to it's eventual success or failure, Color.

The piece is written by Danielle Sacks and a pretty fascinating read not so much because of the verbiage about Nguyen himself, but the article's description of the ethos of Silicon Valley and the startup culture. Interesting content on seed and venture capital investors backing founders who have had multiple successes (defined by exit with money for investors) and a business idea in an area considered hot at the time. While both of these things do certainly carry an import to them, what's often not taken into effort account is the particulars of the idea itself.

Also interesting from the piece was the description of how investors don't necessarily put a mark against the company founder's track record if not all ventures succeeded. Concept being the business failure looked at as simply a shot that didn't work out and not a big deal as long as other efforts did succeed.

As to Nguyen himself, Sacks details his bona fides in the areas of wealth creation and deal-making (in both the initial cash raising and then end-game business selling phases) and how this past success led to such large amounts of money invested in Color as a business idea. This outlay by investors takes on greater import given the underwhelming launch of Color and subsequent repositiong (with that so called pivot being another acceptable and almost expected thing in startups). Whether the company eventually succeeds or not, Nguyen is wealthy from past successes... and likely would resurface with another business idea, and investors willing to back him.

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From the October 2011 issue of Fast Company was another solid feature... this one dealing not with a startup culture, but rather someone creating change in a large corporate environment. The Nine Passions Of 3M's Mauro Porcini is written by Chuck Salter and details the design chief at the Minnesota based conglomerate. Porcini is described as succeeding at 3M by trumpeting the process involved with outstanding design work as well as it's pure aesthetic value. Beyond this, he's developed credibility within the company by doing the all-important trick of being behind design work that's increased sales.

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Additionally, Adam Lisagor Is Advertising's Quietest Pitchman was an interesting short piece from the September FC issue. Written by Bill Barol, it's about Lisagor's small production company, Sandwich Video and the straight-forward and well received online product videos (web ads) produced for the likes of Groupon, Airbnb, and Flipboard (with the Airbnb spot below and four other videos linked from the Fast Company piece).

Interesting Companies Posted On

A post that I've wanted to do for a while now has been on interesting companies and the below list represents alphabetically the businesses (large and small) that I've found of note and posted on from the past year...

1. Airbnb - company website here and blog search results here

2. Amazon - company website here and blog search results here

3. Apple - company website here and blog search results here

4. Ford - company website here and blog search results here

5. Google - company website here and blog search results here

6. Hewlett-Packard - company website here and blog search results here

7. Khan Academy - company website here and blog search results here

8. LinkedIn - company website here and blog search results here

9. Rearden Companies - company website here and blog search results here

10. Salesforce.com - company website here and blog search results here

11. Subaru - company website here and blog search results here

12. TED - company website here and blog search results here

Granted, this blog is still primarily about great writing (both found and the process around producing it), but there are me thinks some interesting companies out there doing cool things.

Sharing Economy Piece from Fast Company

Really interesting piece on the topic of collaborative consumption in the May issue of Fast Company Magazine.

Written by Danielle Sacks, "The Sharing Economy" overviews the idea and business of people sharing stuff and provides a look at the current players and where the market might be headed.

Sacks begins with the story of Neal Gorenflo, a former DHL staffer and then founder of the non-profit Shareable... which came out of Gorenflo working to remove from his life things that didn't add value. While it may seem a squishy step to go from life purpose to growth business area, there really is a lot of use to be had from and money to made out of resource sharing.

To this point, one of the main things covered by Sacks and in this sidebar piece is how many different categories of goods and services can have the concept of collaborative consumption at play. Freecycle, Thredup, Zipcar, Airbnb, Neighborgoods... all players in this space sure to joined by many others.

Several additional sources of information that Sacks cites are a Lisa Gansky Tedx talk on car sharing and the Rachel Botsman book What's Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption. Reference is also made to the idea from Botsman of access to goods and services being more important than ownership of them.

Fascinating concept this sharing thing... and also referenced elsewhere in this this issue of Fast Company with Brave New Co-Working World about shared workspaces.

Japan Disaster & New Ideas Feature - from Time Magazine

Some pretty compelling writing and interesting content from the latest issue of Time Magazine.

The Special Report on the Japan Earthquake and Tsunami featured pieces that captured well both the scope of the devastation and resilience of the people impacted.

To this end, the cover story essay was "The Day the Earth Moved" by Nancy Gibbs and Hanna Beech provided "Aftermath: How Japan Will Recover from the Quake" highlighting actions taken by individual citizens after the disaster. Really solid writing in both stories.

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In the much less important, but still interesting from this issue category was some of the things mentioned in Time's "10 Ideas That Will Change the World" section. Two I found of note were about the concepts of airport communities as well as that of sharing rather than owning:

- "Think of Your Airport As a City — but Nicer" makes reference to the ideas put forth in a book I've heard about several different times lately... "Aerotropolis" by John Kasarda.

- "Today's Smart Choice: Don't Own. Share" is about the idea of item rental as championed by well known companies like Netflix. Also mentioned are less well known businesses such as SnapGoods (borrowing and renting of stuff), Zipcar (car rentals) and Airbnb (vacation rentals).