9 Things I Learned from Reed Hastings @ Netflix

At a private CEO event a few weeks back, I had the pleasure of seeing Reed give a powerpoint-less presentation.   His way of looking at business is quite inspirational, and there’s now doubt it’s a major reason why Netflix succeeded where many others have not.  I’ve been thinking about which of these ideas fit for BzzAgent…regardless, every company could add a little bit of his wisdom.  Here’s what I jotted down (note much of this is paraphrased):

1. When outlining a strategy, instead of just articulating what you’re going to do, always add what you’re NOT going to do.   To know what your strategy will force you to not do will make things much clearer.
2. If you can grow within your market by 10x, then stay in that market.  If you can’t grow by 10 times, then expand into other markets where you can.
3. Companies aren’t like families.  Families provide unconditional love and are highly dysfunctional.  Companies, rather, are high performance teams.  Sports teams make their players try out for their job every year.  If you need a great left tackle, you shouldn’t just keep someone because they were there last year.
4. A great company is not sushi at lunch; it’s working with incredible people.
5. Don’t optimize for people who follow process, optimize for people who think and are mavericks.  Flexibility is more important than efficiency.
6. Coordinate team on strategy but avoid buy0in on tactics.  Think: Highly aligned, loosely coupled.   Occasionally stuff goes wrong, but this allows for much better speed to execution.
7. Managers need to ween selves from crutch of an employee’s time in seat vs how they’re succeeding.
8. If a smart person does something dumb, figure out the problem in the context that you set, not the tactic that they failed at.
9. Value is what you hire and fire on.  Forget the bs flowery stuff.  Your values are based on what makes you decide to hire someone.

When I caught up with Reed after his speaking gig, we talked a little bit about some of his other ideas on compensation.  I’m not sure I buy into those yet, but he’s got me thinking…

Ten Teen Entrepreneurs To Watch

Kids these days. It seems like they’re writing HTML before they learn how to talk. And a lot of them are starting companies before they graduate from high school.

Here’s a list of some of our favorite teen entrepreneurs. And please keep in mind that there are lots of startups we’ve yet to hear about. So if you are a young entrepreneur, make sure to leave a comment below and add your bio and startup information to CrunchBase.

Jessica Mah

Jessica Mah, 19, is currently the CEO and Co-Founder behind Indinero, a Mint.com for small businesses. Mah started her first startup at 13. Last year, she founded internshipIN.com, a site to help high school and college kids find internships in their area. Now, at 19, Mah is finishing up her Computer Science degree from the University of California, Berkley, as well as being the CEO of Indinero.

Ashley Qualls

Ashley Qualls, 19, started WhateverLife when she was 14, a site designed to give MySpace users free Myspace layouts and HTML tutorials. She employs both her mom, and her friends who do graphics for her. Qualls started WhateverLife in 2004 as a hobby, and now has turned into a business, with her site getting anywhere from 150,000 to 360,000 daily page views.

Donny Ouyang

Donny Ouyang, 17, started his first business in 2006 called Kinkarso Network. Kinkarso Network operates a number of web properties including; BattleForums.com, HostBright.net, ChristianAvenue.org, etc. Ouyang has been featured in Entrepreneur, PC Magazine, Retire At 21, Internet Entrepreneurs, and many other sites.

Sam Purtill

Sam Purtill is one of the founding engineerings of YouNoodle, a service that lets users follow start-ups that they are interested in and predict success of start-up teams based on analysis of historical data about qualities of the team’s founders and other information. Purtill originally built the site, and has been with the company since September 2007. Sam placed his previous project, ClassOwl, on hold to join YouNoodle, despite taking the idea to a product in less that six months. He also has worked on various design projects in Romania.

Grant Bell & Robert Day

Grant Bell is a teenage entrepreneur who is the co-founder of Tomorrow’s Web, an online network dedicated to supporting and engaging with young people with an internet in the web, technology and entrepreneurship. Bell is also the Founder of Pitchie, a stealth startup.

Robert Day is the co-founder of Tomorrow’s Web as well. Day has worked for various web companies such as ChannelFlip and Be Broadband’s OpenHub.

Mark Bao

Mark Bao, 17, is an internet entrepreneur based in Boston, MA. Bao is the founder of Avecora and Ramamia. In August 2009, Bao sold his product, Avecora OnDemand, to Branchr Advertising, and renamed the product Atomplan, which he is still the acting CEO of. In the past, Mark has been involved with the Facebook Platform, launching numerous applications, selling three applications, and organising the Facebook developer meetings in Boston, as well as the main event Facebook Developer Garage Boston.

Zachary Collins & Dustin Snider

Zachary Collins and Dustin Snider are the co-founders of Yazzem, a site which allows anyone to share their thoughts about anything that interests them by starting and joining topics. In July 2009, Collins sold Twtbase.com, a database of Twitter apps, and is also home to the very first Twitter applications search engine.

Patrick DeVivo

Patrick DeVivo is a blogger and entrepreneur in New York City. He founded Youth Bloggers Network in May 2007, and then sold the site to Teens in Tech Networks in March of 2009.

Of course, there are entrepreneurs that started their companies at a young age, and since then have grown their businesses. myYearbook co-founders Catherine Cook and Dave Cook started the company in 2005. Catherine is currently a student at Georgetown University, while also working on myYearbook’s growth and features. myYearbook is one of the largest teen oriented social networks, getting about 3 million unique page views per month according to Compete.

Disclosure: I am the Founder and CEO of Teens in Tech Networks. Teens in Tech Networks acquired Youth Bloggers Network in March 2009. Youth Bloggers Network was founded by Patrick DeVivo, who is mentioned above.

How I Did It: Tony Hsieh, CEO, Zappos.com

As told to Max Chafkin

Industry: Retail

2006 Inc. 500 Ranking: 79

Three-Year Growth: 948%

In 1998, 24-year-old Tony Hsieh sold his company, Internet advertiser LinkExchange, to Microsoft for $265 million. A year later, he met an even younger entrepreneur, Nick Swinmurn, who had an idea no investor would touch: selling shoes on the Internet. But Hsieh (pronounced shay) was intrigued and invested $500,000 in ShoeSite.com (they soon changed the name to Zappos, after zapatos, which is Spanish for "shoes"). Within six months, he and Swinmurn were running the show together. Early this year, Swinmurn moved on, leaving Hsieh at the helm of a company that had sales of $252 million in 2005.

I almost deleted the voice mail. Nick left a message saying he wanted to start a company that sold shoes online. I didn't think consumers would buy shoes sight unseen, and Nick didn't have a footwear background. It sounded like the poster child of bad Internet ideas.

But right before I hit Delete, Nick mentioned the size of the retail shoe market--$40 billion. And the more interesting thing was that 5 percent was already being done through mail order catalogs. That intrigued me. Initially, I was just an adviser. But I got sucked in.

We all sat around one day talking about what we wanted the Zappos brand to represent. We decided to be about providing the best service; we said, "We're a service company that just happens to sell shoes." But in order for that to happen, we had to control the entire customer experience. We expanded the warehouse to 77,000 square feet and stopped having manufacturers ship directly to customers. It was a scary time--drop shipping was 25 percent of revenue, and we gave it up all at once.

We thought about going under every day--until we got a $6 million credit line from Wells Fargo. It's now $60 million.

I'd rather spend money on things that improve the customer experience than on marketing. We run the warehouse 24-7--it's not very cheap or efficient, but it allows us to get the shoes out more quickly. We have a 365-day return policy with free shipping both ways.

We have to untrain employees' bad habits from previous call centers, where they're trying to be more efficient by minimizing the time they talk to the customer. If someone is looking for a specific shoe and we happen to be out of stock, we have employees direct those people to competitors' sites.

In January 2004, we decided to move to Las Vegas. It was one of those things we started talking about at the beginning of lunch, and by the end of lunch, we'd decided. We were having a hard time finding good customer service people in San Francisco. Las Vegas has a lot of call centers and lots of people who want to do customer service as a career. We announced it later that week and people were moving by March.

We interview people for culture fit. We want people who are passionate about what Zappos is about--service. I don't care if they're passionate about shoes.

Gurbaksh Chahal - A dream lived, a story of a young CEO from Delhi to US

G was born in the town of Tarn Taran, near Amritsar in Punjab, India to Avtar and Arjinder Chahal. In 1985, his parents received a visa for America through a lottery-based system in India, and the following year, when he was four, the family settled in San Jose, California. His parents had arrived with only $25 to their name, and they struggled at menial jobs to make a future for their four children.

For the Chahal family, as for many immigrants, education was paramount, but G left high school at sixteen to form Click Agents, an Internet advertising company, which he sold two years later for $40 million. In January 2004, he launched a second company, BlueLithium - the next generation in Internet advertising. The company was focused on data, optimization, and analytics and became a pioneer of behavioral targeting. BlueLithium was named one of the top 100 private companies in America three years in a row by AlwaysOn, and in 2006, it received highest honor as Top Innovator of the Year. (Previous winners included Google, Skype, and Salesforce.com.) On September 4th, 2007, Yahoo! announced that it was acquiring BlueLithium for $300 million in cash.
G is living proof that no matter how humble one's beginnings, there is truly no limit to what an individual can achieve.

After he completed his role at Yahoo, G signed up with the William Morris Agency.

G starred on FOX's prime-time network show The Secret Millionaire. He has appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Bonnie Hunt, EXTRA, Neil Cavuto, among others, and has been profiled in such publications as The New York Times, Entrepreneur magazine, and The San Francisco Chronicle. He completed his memoir, "The Dream" which globally released Q4 2008. G is also currently developing several other television shows and recently launched his third company, gWallet.

World's Youngest CEOs

 

Thr r many types of people on  this earth, I have meet many people, but here is two ppl who changed my lifestyle and ideas, here in this list thr r two little ppl, vishnu is my best friend and i come to know abt sreelakshmi from vishnu.

I m Happy, that youngistan (indian youths) boom themselves, to catch their Position in Valley, Pray for More....

Hope i won't get into that list, but try some big.

Here is a person in below pics, you ppl already know this gentleman

Suhas Gopinath (born November 4, 1986) is an Indian enterprenuer. He is the founder, CEO, and President of Globals Inc, an IT company.

nothing but, SUHAS GOPINATH got a name in valley, But VISHNU is a unidentified Super Hero will be a star @ valley soon, but join hands for vishnu 

   Sreelakshmi Suresh, the Youngest Web Designer Girl

 

Sreelakshmi Suresh is the Youngest Web Designer Girl of the World. Designing websites is a passion for Sreelakshmi. At the age of eight she is an expert web designer and created the World Record by designing and developing the official website of her school (www.presentationhss.com).And now she is the Youngest CEO (eDesign) also. She has won several national & international awards for her excellence in web designing. 

 Sreelakshmi Suresh is the Youngest Ever Member of the Association of American Webmasters and has already bagged about 26 National and International honours including the prestigious Global Internet Directories Gold Award and Golden Web Awards. 

"Sreelakshmi Suresh is not your average eight year old. When children her age have to be torn away from the television to their homework,  she is spinning grand web designs" Hindustan Times".  "I must say our school is blessed to have such a talent" says Sr. Roselit, Head Mistress of her school.

 Sreelakshmi Suresh is now appointed as the Brand Ambassador ofInfoGroup and she is the Director of YGlobes Technologies Inc.

Now, 5th standard student of Presentation Higher Secondary School, Kozhikode, Kerala. Just eight-years old, Sreelakshmi Suresh has designed and developed a website for her school and created new world record.

Sreelakshmi had been devoting a lot of time on the computer even before she started school. However, the same has not stopped her from pursuing her studies and her extra curricular activities. All her holidays were spent before the computer creating and modifying the website designs. 

The school website, though officially launched on the 15th of January, 2007, was actually available on the web from September 2006 onwards. Accolades and tributes started pouring in from all sources since the site became available on the web. 

Initially, she used to draw pictures using Paint and slowly started preparing web pages in MSWord. Then started using FrontPage to develop web pages, which is more equipped and user friendly. Now she has started using DreamWeaver and animation softwares for Web Designing. 

Sreelakshmi Suresh is the only child of Adv. Suresh Menon and Mrs. Viju Suresh. She is residing at Chevayoor of Kozhikode district in Kerala.

when  children of her age are glued to the TV, eight-year-old Sreelakshmi Suresh is busy exploring web designing.

The fourth standard student of Presentation High Secondary School in Kozhikode, Kerala, has proved her mettle by designing her school website, to be launched on January 15, 2007.

The Association of American Webmasters has honoured her with its official membership, a rare honour for a girl so young.

Daughter of Suresh Menon, an advocate and Viju Suresh, a schoolteacher, Sreelakshmi’s brush with the digital world began at the age of four.Initially, a little prodding was needed. But once she took off it was a flight to the glory. “After studies I used to spend hours before the terminal. Since my school did not have an official site, I took it as a challenge to design one,” explains Sreelakshmi.

For students of her school, she is a role model.

“She is an inspiration for even grown up students… our school is blessed with such a talented girl,” school headmistress Sister Roselit praises her.

THE NEXT ONE IS MY BEST FRIEND

 Vishnu Prasad Naidu

This is an interview on him by a leading newspaper in India, THE HINDU

For a student of class X, young Vishnu Prasad’s understanding of the Internet is amazing. Listen to him for five minutes and you realise that the lad aims to emerge a business tycoon in the not too distant future.

Prasad, however, has had no formal education in .Net technology or networking techniques. He hails from a middle-class family. His father is a Central Government employee while his mother is a homemaker. Prasad himself is a product of a State Board institution in Coimbatore.

The family bought a computer when the lad was studying in class VIII. “I had always yearned to make money online. I surfed the Net, gathered information and created my first blog ‘dvishnu123.blogspot.com.”

“I was enthused by the number of visitors to my blog. I went ahead and registered in social networking sites such as Orkut and managed to reach out to a wider group. That was in January 2008. Around that time I first got the feel of earning online from the Ads on my Web site,www.dvishnu.com. I earned $60,” recalls Prasad.

Today, when most youngsters in his age group think of relaxing a bit after writing the Class X examination, he is busy giving tips to bloggers on how to make money, how to get traffic to one’s site, and so on.

At 15, he owns around 50 Web-based businesses, Web sites and domain names. “I am a domain reseller. I understand SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). I have 10 sites to manage,” says Prasad.

(SEO is the practice of optimising a Web site to increase the traffic the site receives from search engines).

But at 15, can a minor start a company in his own capacity, eWorld asked him. Prasad replies promptly that he is being helped by a third-year engineering student, his Orkut friend, from Kumbakonam. Also, his maternal uncle (a retired headmaster) is the guiding hand behind the show.

“My dream is to enable worldwide users benefit from my service,” he says, and cites Wikipedia as an example.

He has floated a company Silver Star Solutions and established offices in Kumbakonam, Hyderabad, Chennai and Tiruchi. He has provided employment to 12 persons.

Over the past eighteen months, Vishnu’s turnover has crossed the Rs 7-lakh mark. “I’ve managed this by selling Ads links in my site, sold a single link for $200 and so on.”

How exactly does this happen? Prasad explains that the shopping advertisements on dvishnu.com attract those visiting his site. When they shop online, he gets paid a certain amount.

Has the meltdown affected his earnings? “Definitely. For an SEO, a client paid $25,000 last year, but he is offering only $4,000 this year.”

He has created www.5co.in, which is similar to blogger.com. The beta version is up and running. “It is a site for creating blogs, optimising template.”

Asked about the need for creating a similar site, Prasad says, “I want to be the first to create the world’s smallest ID.

‘in.com’ is the smallest ID at present. To beat this, I bought ‘in.vg’. My plan is to launch the world’s smallest e-mail ID, the world’s smallest Web blog and largest online portal. The deadline for this project is April 1, 2010.”

Intrigued, eWorld looked up Prasad’s Web sites and spoke to the third-year student who helps him.

His friend, Vijayakumar, has hosted riaon.com, a site that offers tips on the latest applications and services on the Net such as twitters and knoppix.

We asked how he handles the money being generated by the business. As with other questions, Prasad has a prompt reply: he reinvests the money in establishing offices at different places, in buying domains and in paying the employees.

 

This was his interview in Hindu newspaper, he is my best friend, who thinks very innovative and wana achieve, but unauthorised. He grew up to this extent without the help or guidance of any one. Everything grew on him from his own interest and the burning desire. If u think that he can be a great man in valley, pls contact me thro email (cloudsonstreet@yahoo.com),He has more ideas,and wana get some fame and limelight very soon. I can see the burning desire in him. SUPPORT VISHNU, who will create a

 On this world of Internet.

His Webpage: Un Countable - More than 200 PR3+ and others uncountable.

Please contact him at info[at]dvishnu[dot]com if you wish to support him and give some torch!

Support young ppl !