Reflections on navigating inflection points

Sometimes there comes an inflection point where you have to make a great leap of faith.

I can still remember that morning back in 2008, when I woke up in Shymkent, Khazakastan. I was feeling undecided about taking up Bernhard and Franzikas’ offer the night before to go visit them in Europe or just turning around and heading back home to Singapore overland. I was down to just USD3,000 in my bank account at that point. Shymkent was about the half way mark if you were planning to travel overland from Asia to Europe.

Sitting in the cafe sipping my coffee, I saw then the only other backpacker I have seen during this entire period, other than the pack I was with, walking through the door.

I soon realized after a quick chat he was heading in the direction of Asia overland. He had maps for territories westwards and I for those eastwards. After brief moment of deliberation I exchanged maps with him.

2008 was a period before smart phones and Google maps existed, giving up the map eastwards was like shutting the door to retreat back to Asia if I decided at any point to abort. You could imagine how frightening that experience was.

24 hours later in Astana, I saw broadcast over the news that severe riots had finally broke out after months of tension in the western region of China. The path back eastwards overland was closed and nailed shut. I guess I had no choice but to fully committed at that point. Strangely, with total clarity of purpose brought about a profound sense of calm.

Three months later after experiencing an actual deport, crashing at a few friends’ place and sleeping in the streets on multiple occasions I arrived in London UK, accomplishing my overland trip from Asia to Europe. And it was at the height of the 2008 financial crisis… Oh boy…

And that was definitely not the only inflection point I have experienced. In hindsight, inflection points tends to force you to either fully and totally commit to whatever your pursuits are or give up. The process catalyzes a one way change. It require a great deal of faith. Successful navigation of such events brings along with it total clarity of purpose until the next inflection point.

I guess part of the reason I founded GetData.IO was to provide people with a simple and affordable way to get the data they need so as to navigate those inflection points that life inevitably throw at them.  To help them make that decision they know they need to make and to have that peace of mind when the decision is finally made.

Diogenes the Cynic: The war against the world

Diogenes the cynic: the war against the world

The building blocks of Diogenes’ philosophy

  1. Self sufficiency: only need yourself and dispense with societal support
  2. Shamelessness: be willing to break even the most sacrosanct rules to express absolute freedom
  3. Indifference: be unconcerned with things not within your control
  4. Insensibility: to become insensible to both pain and pleasure
  5. Ignorance: To limit intellectual activities to those that are of immediate value for human life
  6. Disciplined training:
    • commit to a program of self training that strengthens his character,
    • lessens dependencies on social and physical needs,
    • maintain his desires and impulses under strict rational control
  7. Strength of character:
    • aspire to develop in himself a character and physical constitution like those associated with Hercules
    • that renders him impervious to vicissitudes and sufferings of human life
  8. Poverty:
    • understand that virtue and happiness cannot be found in the search and acquisition of physical possessions
    • divest himself of as many things as possible,
    • retaining the bare necessities to keep him alive and that assure him the freedom that Hercules esteemed as the most precious thing in the world
  9. Philanthrophy
    • Recognize his moral obligation to make himself useful in the task of dispelling illusions that rob people of their ability to be happy and live in accordance with nature
  10. Contempt for the opinions of many
    • renounce the need to be honored or appreciated by others
    • welcome repudiation and insults
    • look with contempt or suspicion at the values and customs by which people guide themselves

Predator’s Ball by Connie Bruck

  • no matter how much research you done regarding a stock you don’t have a contract what the future price should be
  • with high yield bond there is a contract for a certain price in a future, if you are correct about the calculation, you will be correct about your yield
  • bargain price: liquidation price 75cents on the dollar buy at 20 cents
  • when you are not a big established investment firm like Lehmen brothers, you have no franchise to protect. You are free to go the unconventional route for potential outsized returns
  • great ideas are born bad. Its easy to make your way to a great idea from crazy outrageous ones than cautious and sensible ones. Investment bankers by default filter out the crazy outrageous ones.
  • Contrarian thinkers need to train themselves to see things via unconventional routes
  • ways to structure a bond
    • give money back sooner
    • give higher interest rates
    • give more stock
    • give stocks cheap
  • It is easier for corporation to pay interest which is tax deductible than dividends which are not
  • Bonds offer process
    • first tier  high rollers offer liquidity get to buy at cheaper price and exit earlier
    • second tier payers, with franchise to protect, who want to avoid stigma of being junk bond buyers will come in later at more expensive price and exit later.
  • Successful leverage buyout scenario: after buy out use cashflow from business to pay off the junk bonds thus deleverage the business
  • Mutual fund arbitrage: compare value of underlying portfolio and stock price
  • If you are right about a company being undervalued and it is willing to put itself up for sale, there will be buyers
  • Poison pill: defense mechanism against corporate take overs. When would be acquirers crosses threshold of ownership, existing shareholders are given extravagant rights rights making it less desirable as take over target
  • Michael Milken:
    • perception versus reality, see what the world could not.
    • Vision is Strength.
    • capital is abundant, vision is scarce.
    • excess capital is not strength but opportunity for weakness
    • capital put in the hands of someone with vision will result in drastically different results.
    • return of the owner manager as opposed to the corporate manager
    • by-pass the China wall principle where companies try to isolate the deal making and arbitrage departments
    • knows many industry in depth

Related references

King Icahn, biography of a renegade capitalist by Mark Stevens

  • way of thinking
    • There is a strategy behind everything. Everything fits. Thinking this way taught me to compete in many things, not only take over but chess and arbitrage
    • Empiricism says knowledge is based on observation and experience, not feelings
    • Studying 20th century philosophy trains your mind for takeovers
    • Chain thinking: just like chess, in any transaction, think of every single possible move and counter move
    • always consider what might be the worst case scenario and then protect your downside while increasing your control
    • a civilization starts to decline when a large part of its population stops working
  • Icahn/Kingsley theory: focus the market’s attention on the disparity in values and someone will buy you out
    • Take over strategy potential outcome after indicating it as a take over target
      • acquisition of shares by original suitor
      • hostile challenger
      • white knight  who will come and free up the locked up value
    • Prefer stocks with limited downside exposure, gravitate towards out of favor stocks that had already been discounted by the market
    • When analyzing a company, earnings does not always present a clear picture. Depreciation is paper losses. Cashflow presents a better picture. Key components to analyze
      • asset
      • return on equity
      • cashflow
      • capitalization
    • committed the mistake of just focusing on financial engineering to reduce cost, think about how to grow the business
    • Did not realize after fully taking over a company that the revenue side of the business is usually circumscribed to external factors not under direct management control
  • On negotiations
    • everything has to be negotiated
    • threaten, continuously threaten by painting a very dire picture. This helps frame the alternative which you demand as something very very reasonable
    • wear down your opponent
    • answer a question with a question
    • always push the deal as far as it can without blowing up
    • wait until a company is so stretched in need of a deal before buying on the most favorable terms
  • On goal setting
    • have no fixed goals
    • see all the possibilities
  • Princeton liberal arts eduction:
    • exposure to eclectic mix of human knowledge teaching a student how to think, explore and question rather than prepare them for a specific career
    • the best thinkers will rise to the top of their chosen careers precisely because they have not limited themselves to narrow courses of study

Related references

Book summary: Buffett the making of an American capitalist by Roger Lowenstein

Keep things simple. Simple should not be confused with easy.

Business model assessment

  • Easy to understand economics
  • Strong defensible moat
  • Trustworthy management who treat capital of shareholders with ownerlike care
  • Selling at a reasonable price
  • Able to generate high returns without excessive usage of debts

Guiding principles

  • Stick to companies with your circle of competence
  • Ignore macro economics trends and analyst forecast
  • Choosing between growth and value is a misguided one. See the business model holistically.
  • A share in a business is basically a bond whose coupon rate you need to figure in yourself
  • The character flaws of an individual tend to have very serious spill over effects. Always check for serious character flaws of individuals whose company you plan to invest in.

Float

  • Buy cash generating assets to finance purchase of more assets
  • Insurance is a prepaid model
  • Blue Chip is a prepaid stamp sales model

Management of cashflow

  • Give out dividend
  • Share buy back
  • Reinvest or MnA

The last option is almost always value destroying unless the management can generate ROI above it’s current RoA rate. This is predicated upon a strong defensible moat.

Leadership

  • Confidence
  • Perspective
  • Ability to focus
  • Communication

Book Summary: Lost and Founder

Radical Candor/Transparency

It is hard but it works – needs to be tampered with empathy

On being product focused

  • Consulting is limited by time and people – not scalable
  • Effective Product-focused business
    • reach
    • scalability
  • Start with a product informed by your consulting – real life problems others face

Impediment to shifting focus

  • Too comfortable
  • not enough time
  • difficulty finding the right customers for the product

On being a founder

  • Great founders enable a vision
  • forget about being hands on most of the time
  • job scope changes every six months – for any road block encountered focus on sufficing the requirements instead of perfecting it
  • you rarely get to do what you love to do
  • be cognizant on when to lead and when not to – have the specialist do the job
  • Cultivate self awareness in strength and weakness – structure company to work around them
  • Attribute of founder is instilled with near-permanence in the organization while those of supporting team fluctuates
  • the hardest parts of the business is less a reflection about the business than about the person experiencing them
  • Build expertise before building network, build network before building company
  • Focus on and reward the behavior, let the outcome take care of itself

On Values

  • Authentic values force hard decisions – held to be more important than money
  • have real costs: Impede certain behavior and strategy
  • Values are discovered instead of set
  • Used as a yard stick for recruiting new members to the cause. Helps get pass the competence versus cultural fit dilemma

On recruiting

  • CTO should be those that should be oriented towards education instead of shielding you from the nitty gritty details (black box)
  • Use your value system as a yard stick
  • Hiring for diversity will make the mental model of the organization more holistic
  • Great managers / coaches might not be great individual contributors

On markets and pivots

  • Pivots Are expensive don’t make it a habit – only resort to this tactic when the original hypothesis is not longer valid
  • focus on the market and then find a field ignored by others because it appears unsexy. From there craft a solution
  • Err on the side of execution

On investors

  • Need to take money for the right reason
  • Investors interest will tend to get out of alignment overtime (return multiples and investment horizons)
  • 80 percent of returns are by 20 percent of investments
  • They need at least a 10X to break even in a position for all the other losing positions they took
  • They don’t bring much value to the table
  • follow up with CEOs they invested in to understand how they react in a shit storm
  • Can help provide information on salary ranges

Choosing a market

  • If you can keep your ego in check you can chase after smaller markets and don’t need VC money
  • Great ideas are born of mediocre ideas that become better by
    • time spent iterating
    • humility learning
    • surviving
  • look for searches that indicate problems
    • Google Adwords
    • Moz’s keyword Explorer

Knowing your customers

Defining your user base

  • Call 3 different types of users
  • Find out why they subscribed and stayed
  • Craft messaging toward this group of people

Discounts are a doubled edged sword – while they might attract signups, these folks tend to have a higher churn rate

Schedule regular interactions with your user so that you can understand their habits. It helps you get to an empathetic position with them.

On Products

  • Feature set needs to be coherent enough to be able to deliver value
  • Early adopters
    • have very different expectation as compared to early majority –
    • hence more forgiving
    • ok accepting MVP
  • Retention triumphs acquisition any day

Marketing

  • Optimize for acquisition loops that reinforces the UVP instead of linear acquisition channels

Focused Execution

  • Practice the discipline of focus.
  • Important to Focus and not waver around unnecessarily. Its a waste of resources
  • A very focused and simplified product offering will help users to more easily understand and adopt it
  • Helps keep teams lean as a by-product
    • ROA improves dramatically
    • helps avoid future layoffs
  • Focus on what will not change in the next 10 years

Related references

  • Lean Startup, Eric Ries
  • Sprint, Jake Knapp
  • Venture Deals, Brad Feld

Key take aways from Trust me I am lying

Trust me I am lying

The publication eco-system

  • Every content creator within the publication ecosystem is under immense pressure to produce content under the tightest deadline.
    • renumeration is based on number of articles per period time
    • eye balls are converted to advertising revenue
    • lots of copying happens
  • Media was once about protecting a new, on the web it is about building one
    • well defined scope matters
    • content that dives deep into its vertical matters
  • Headlines are the most important
  • Tools of the trade
    • lavish pictures
    • impostors, frauds and fake interviews
    • support for the underdog causes
    • anonymous sources
    • prominent coverage of high society and events
    • different age but same old tricks
  • On monetization
    • Advertising is the main driver of revenue
    • Subscription model focus on trusted source as opposed to advertising source
    • RSS got killed because it went against the interest of Advertisers
  • On the online medium
    • The demands of the medium forces the bloggers to act they way they are
    • Tim Berners Lee stacked new content on the top and the rest of the internet thus follows
    • Thus the need to constantly create new content

On Virality

  • The most powerful predictor of virality is how much anger an article evokes.
  • The most powerful predictor of what spreads online is anger
    • sensationalism
    • extremism
    • sex
    • scandal
    • hatred
  • Things must be negative but not too negative so as to incite action
  • Media needs to get you feeling negative so that you are more likely to share
  • Empty vessels are incline to snark so as to feel unjustifiably good about themselves

On reality

  • Chris Hedges
    • is complicated and boring
    • the masses are incapable and unwilling to handle its confusion
    • In an age of images, entertainment and instant emotional gratification, no one seeks honesty and gratification
  • Cognitive biases
    • we are bad at being sketical
      • availability biases
      • narrative fallacy
    • we are worst at correcting our wrong beliefs
      • social proofing
      • consistency biases
  • First decide what you are intending to do with the information you collected

Related readings

Navigating the trough of sorrow

While I was reading through most of the success stories that were published on IndieHackers.com, it occurred to me that my project GetData.IO really took longer than most others to gain significant traction, a full 5 years actually.

The beginning

I first stumbled upon this project back in December 2012 when I was trying to solve two other problems of my own.

In my first problem, I was trying to identify the best stocks to buy on the Singapore Stock Exchange. While browsing through the stocks listed on their website, I soon realize that most stock exchanges as well as other financial websites gear their data presentation towards quick buy and sell behaviors. If you were looking to get data for granular analysis based on historical company performance as opposed to stock price movements, its like pulling teeth. Even then, important financial data I needed for decision making purposes were spread across multiple websites. This first problem lead me to write 2 web-scrappers, one for SGX.com and the other for Yahoo Finance, to extract data-sets which I later combined to help me with my investment decision-making process.

Once I happily parked my cash, I went back to working on my side project then. It was a travel portal which aggregates all the travel packages from tour agencies located in Southeast Asia. It was not long before I encountered my second problem… I had to write a bunch of web-scrapers again to pull data from vendor sites which do not have the APIs! Being forced to write my 3rd, 4th and maybe 5th web-scraper within a single week lead me to put on hold all work and step back to look at the bigger picture.

The insight

Being a web developer, and understanding how other web developers think, it quickly occurred to me the patterns that repeat themselves across webpage listings as well as nested webpages. This is especially true for naming conventions when it came to CSS styling. Developers tend to name their CSS classes the way they would actual physical objects in the world.

I figured if there existed a Semantic Query Language that is program independent, it would provide the benefit of querying webpages as if they were database tables while providing for clean abstraction of schema from the underlying technology. These two insights still prove true today after 6 years into the project.

The trough of sorrow

While the first 5 years depicted in the trend line above seem peaceful due to a lack of activity, it felt anything but peaceful. During this time, I was privately struggling with a bunch of challenges.

Team management mistakes and pre-mature scaling

First and foremost was team management. During the inception of the project my ex-schoolmate from years ago approached me to ask if there was any project that he could get involved in. Since I was working on this project, it was a natural that I would invited him to join the project. We soon got ourselves into an incubator in Singapore called JFDI.

In hindsight, while the experience provided us with general knowledge and friends, it really felt like going through a whirlwind. The most important piece of knowledge I came across during the incubation period was this book recommendation?—?The Founder’s dilemma. I wished I read the book before I made all of the mistakes I did.

There was a lot of hype (see the blip in mid-2013), tension and stress during the period between me and my ex-schoolmate. We went our separate ways due to differences in vision of how the project should proceed shortly after JDFI Demo Day. It was not long before I grew the team to a size of 6 and had it disbanded, realizing it was naive to scale in size before figuring out the monetization model.

Investor management mistakes

During this period of time, I also managed to commit a bunch of grave mistakes which I vow never to repeat again.

Mistake #1 was being too liberal with the stock allocation. When we incorporated the company, I was naive to believe the team would stay intact in its then configuration all the way through to the end. The cliff before vesting were to begin was only 3 months with full vesting occurring in 2 years. When my ex-schoolmate departed, the cap table was in a total mess with a huge chunk owned by a non-operator and none left for future employees without significant dilution of existing folks. This was the first serious red-flag when it came to fund raising.

Mistake #2 was giving away too much of the company for too little, too early in the project before achieving critical milestones. This was the second serious red-flag that really turned off follow up would-be investors.

Mistake #3 was not realizing the mindset difference of investors in Asia versus Silicon Valley, and thereafter picking the wrong geographical location (a.k.a network) to incubate the project. Incubating the project in the wrong network can be really detrimental to its future growth. Asian investors are inclined towards investing in applications that have a clear path to monetization while Silicon Valley investors are open towards investing in deep technology of which the path to monetization is yet apparent. During the subsequent period, I saw two similar projects incubated and successfully launched via Ycombinator.

The way I managed to fix the three problems above was to acquire funds I didn’t yet have by taking up a day job while relocating the project to back to the Valley’s network. I count my blessings for having friends who lend a helping hand when I was in a crunch.

Self-doubt

I remembered having the conversation with the head of the incubator two years into the project during my visit back to Singapore when he tried to convince me the project was going nowhere and I should just throw in the towel. I managed to convince him and more importantly myself to give it go for another 6 months till the end of the year.

I remember the evenings and weekends alone in my room while not working on my day job. In between spurts of coding, I would browse through the web or sit staring at the wall trying to envision how product market fit would look like. As what Steve Jobs mentioned once in his lecture, it felt like pushing against a wall with no signs of progress or movement whatever so. If anything, it was a lot of frustration, self-doubt and dejection. A few times, I felt like throwing in the towel and just giving up. For a period of 6 months in 2014, I actually stopped touching the code in total exasperation and just left the project running on auto-pilot, swearing to never look at it again.

The hiatus was not to last long though. A calling is just like the siren, even if somewhat faint sometimes, it calls out to you in the depths of night or when just strolling along on the serene beaches of California. It was not long before I was back on my MacBook plowing through the project again with renewed vigor.

First signs of life

It was mid-2015, the project was still not showing signs of any form of traction. I had by then stockpiled some cash from my day job and was starting to get interested in acquiring a piece of real estate with the hope of generating some cashflow to bootstrap the project while freeing up my own time. It was during this period of time that I got introduced to my friend’s room mate who also happened to be interested in real estate.

We started meeting on weekends and utilizing GetData.IO to gather real estate data for our real estate investment purposes. We were gonna perform machine learning for real estate. The scope of the project was really demanding. It was during this period of dog fooding that I started understanding how users would use GetData.IO. It was also then when I realized how shitty and unsuited the infrastructure was for the kind and scale of data harvesting required for projects like ours. It catalyzed a full rewrite of the infrastructure over the course of the next two years as well as brought the semantic query language to maturity.

Technical challenges

Similar to what Max Levchin mentioned in the book Founder’s at work, during this period of time there was always this fear in the back of my mind that I would encounter technical challenges which would be unsolvable.

The site would occasionally go down as we started scaling the volume of daily crawls. I would spend hours on the weekends digging through the logs to attempt at reproducing the error so as to understand the root cause. The operations was like a (data) pipeline, scaling one section of the pipeline without addressing further down sections would inevitably cause fissures and breakage. Some form of manual calculus in the head would always need to be performed to figure out the best configuration to balance the volume and the costs.

The number 1 hardest problem I had to tackle during this period of time was the problem of caching and storage. As the volume of data increase, storage cost increase and so did wait time required before data could be downloaded. This problem brought down the central database a few times.

After procrastinating for a while as the problem festered in mid-2016, I decided that it was to be the number 1 priority to be solved. I spend a good 4 months going to big-data and artificial intelligence MeetUps in the Bay Area to check out the types of solutions available for the problem faced. While no suitable solutions were found, the 4 months helped elicit corner cases to the problem which I did not previously thought of. I ended up building my own in-house solution.

Traction and Growth

An unforeseen side effect of solving the storage and caching problem was its effect on SEO. The effects on SEO would not be visible until mid-2017 when I started seeing increased volume of organic traffic to the site. As load times got reduced from more than a minute in some cases to less than 400 milliseconds seconds, the volume of pages indexed by bots would increase, accompanied by increase in volume of visitors and reduction in bounce rates.

Continued education

It was in early-2016 that I came across an article expounding the benefits of reading widely and deeply by Paul Graham which prompted me to pick up my hobby of reading again. A self-hack demonstrated to me by the same friend, who helped relocated me here to the Bay Area, which I pursued vehemently got me reading up to 1.5 books a week. These are books which I summarized on my personal blog for later reference. All the learnings developed my mental model of the world and greatly aided in the way I tackled the project.

Edmodo’s VP of engineering hammered in the importance of not boiling the ocean when attempting to solve a technical problem, of always being judicious with the use of resource during my time working as a tech-lead under his wing.  Another key lesson learned from him is that in some circumstances being liked and being effective do not go hand in hand. As the key decision maker, it is important to steadfastly practice the discipline of being effective.

Head of Design, Tim and Lukas helped me appreciate the significance of UX during my time working with them and how it ties to user psychology.

Edmodo’s CEO introduced us to mindfulness meditation late-2016 to help us weather through the turbulent times that was happening within the company then. It was rough. The practice which I have adopted till to date has helped keep my mind balance while navigating the uncertainties of the path I am treading.

Edmodo’s VP of product sent me for a course late-2017 which helped consolidate all the knowledge I have acquired till then into a coherent whole. The knowledge gained has helped greatly accelerated the progress of GetData.IO. During the same period, I was also introduced by him the Vipasanna mediation practice which coincidentally a large percentage of the management team practices.

One very significant paradigm shift I observed in myself during this period of continued education is the observed relationship between myself and the project. It has changed from an attitude of urgently needing to succeed at all cost to an attitude of open curiosity and fascination as one would an open ended science project.

Moving forward

To date, I have started working full time on the project again. GetData.IO has the support of more than 1,500 community members worldwide. Our mission is to turn the Web into the fully functional Giant Graph Database of Human Knowledge. Financially, with the help of our community members, the project is now self-sustaining. I feel grateful for all the support and lessons gained during this 6 year journey. I look forward to the journey ahead as I continue along my path.

Book summary: Creative capital

  • During the world depression most funds were invested in ultra conservative funds. This meant limited investment new untried industries
  • World War 2 helped reduce unemployment rate in the US to below 10%. This was driven by Government spending in procurement of war time machines.
  • US Industries like car manufacturing in Detroit were either not willing or had a hard time keeping up with demands. Preferring initially to cater to consumer demands.
  • The Depression was a great opportunity for Doriot as he was hired for many directorship positions to oversee many ailing companies in different industries giving him a very wide and diverse portfolio of experience
  • World War 2 triggered the rise of venture capital in the military which was later spun off into the private sector
  • The breach in paradigm between not seeing human as a fighting machine as the default versus seeing human as a fighting machine that needs to be well equipped was where venture capital first flourished in world war 2

Quick summary of Facebook early days

Eco-system

  • Palo Alto was the hub where technology innovation happened
  • People forgot to send Mark Zuckerberg the memo that the consumer internet was over
  • The idea of a web about people linked together online was relatively new then. The accepted norm of the day was about pages linked together
  • on the web the values of a few people can have a huge impact on everyone – the web will ultimately go where the collective conscience wants to go

Product Management

  • Getting users to use their real name is very important as it will limit the need to monitor for porn since it is tied directly back to their personal reputation
  • Be very focused and clear what your product is supposed to do – small details are extremely important
    • Facebook is a utility to efficiently communicate with friends
    • MySpace is an online community to share similar interest
    • it was a dead simple product. Just users profiles
  • Uptake of a well crafted feature is pretty organic and retention is high
  • Photo tagging was the largest growth driver
  • your home Page is constantly changing is a new concept – your personalized newspaper
  • user research help elevating understanding from the conversation from “our users are so stupid” to what makes sense for our users –
    • people became scared when they did understand what was going on
    • match user complains to corresponding usage data of the same person
    • give people the control or even an illusion of one on how they are presented publicly on their feed to alleviate fear

Engineering

  • Failure to scale infrastructure properly when required will kill the user experience
  • User needs and behavior drives engineering activities

Culture and HR

  • The team was really focused as a group
  • Ok to pay with stock for services rendered to company
  • The social graph is based on Graph Theory, a mathematical concept that will appeal to someone with math background
  • move fast break things as a concept stopped working at 10 engineers. Some level of discipline became necessary
  • Younger people had simpler lives and didn’t own much. 75% of adults who joined the company in the early days became divorced
  • The culture became very clear and apparent early in
    • Facebook is undergraduate culture,
    • Google is graduate culture
  • Acquisition offers should be considered on the merit of whether the decision to go ahead will further the mission
  • Mark and his whole team just kept repeatedly using the same word “Domination!!!” as a mantra until Mark was told to stop by the general counsel

External reference