Bruce Lee, beautiful things and the guy who built the iPhone

A couple of weeks ago, Freddy Anzures, one of the chief designers of the iPhone spoke to our Creativity and Design class. He was a colleague of our professor from Frog Design.

We learned that the opening sound when you “slide to unlock” the iPhone and the closing sound when you click the little button on the top right were the sounds of his high school locker opening and closing! He talked about his overarching design philosophy which was: build things you deeply care about and make people smile! All his work seemed to embody this simple principle of thoughtfully designing beautiful things that make people smile. The most awesome part of the presentation was when he talked about how Bruce Lee was a constant source of inspiration. He showed us this video!

Little Missmatched!

Last week, the Founder and CEO of LittleMissmatched spoke to our Creativity and Design Class. The whole business model is predicated on whimsical mismatched polka-dotted and striped socks sold in packs of three!!! The company has revenues of $25 million, sells their apparel in over 3000 retail outlets and has evolved from primarily serving teenage girls to mens and womens clothing. This year they received $17.3 million from Catterton Partners, a leading private equity firm.

This is the kind of idea I could see my frat boy friends from undergrad come up with while passing a bong: dude how cool would it be if we started a company that sold mismatched socks!!! But this is a legit. business and the founders are probably laughing their way to the bank!

Tuesday Evening Tete-a-Tete with Mr. Bezos

From an older entry!

I have always hoped that my two years at Stern would allow me the time and space to get re-energized by new ideas and give me privileged access to leading minds in business and society. However, I am constantly faced with a conundrum all too familiar to business school students: to focus on the short-term priorities and demands of school or to extract oneself from the hustle and bustle of everyday life and be inspired by something new. Last Tuesday, whilst lounging around Sosnoff I learned that Jeff Bezos was going to speak at Schimmel Auditorium. I hadn’t rsvp’d for the event but hustled my way into the auditorium under the pretext that I would cover the event for The Oppy (the school magazine)

(De)Mystifying Mr. Bezos

At first glance, Mr. Jeff Bezos, the current founder and CEO of Amazon.com seems like a rather ordinary, nondescript man. But one is quickly drawn in by his hyperbolic charm. He is a lanky looking man with an ungainly walk, a distinctively optimistic persona and a gregarious countenance. He laughs boisterously at his own jokes (to a near-silent crowd that laughs awkwardly in response) and seems like he is made up of one part overzealous nerd and one part manic raconteur with a thirst for adventure. Once you get past the shear joy of watching this man interact with his interviewer on stage (Kevin Maney from Conde Naste’s Portfolio magazine) you start to take in the little nuggets of wisdom he has to offer. While he tries to be fashionably self-deprecating and chalks up his good fortune to “planetary alignment,” there is a method to his madness. So what did I learn from this super-geek with an $8.4 billion net worth and a priceless, caterwauling laugh? A few insights gleaned from the one hour interview are as follows:

Thoughts on Amazon: The Kindle might Smolder the Book

Amazon like most other start-ups has the perfectly romantic coming-of-age narrative. Jeff talked about how he quit his “high paying job” to capitalize on the 2300% growth rate of the internet, how he drove across the country with his wife and typed up the business plan for Amazon in the car and how his friend’s divorce attorney helped incorporate the company! Amazon the fledgling sapling that took shape in one man’s brain is all grown up now into a big bad rainforest (couldn’t help that one). Jeff spent most of his time talking about The Kindle. In the spirit of trying new things (building a hardware device has never been part of Amazon’s core competency) Amazon launched the Kindle in November 2007. The Kindle priced at around $400 dollars is a book reader device, that allows users to download more than 88,000 digital titles. It has been met with wild success since its launch.
Jeff talked about how Amazon was innovating on a format that hadn’t been innovated on for thousands of years! The book as a format for reading as we know it can be traced back to the tenth century B.C when the Phoenicians brought writing and the papyrus to Greek. Jeff argued that the Kindle was better than reading and collecting physical books for a host of reasons including: having the ability to access any book in the world in less than 60 seconds, being able to look up words while reading, being able to change font sizes at whim, making and saving margin notes and doing all of this for cheaper (price of a digital book is approximately $10). I for one still enjoy the physicality of a book but all this might change. Will The Kindle revolutionize the future of reading and render the physical book obsolete? Or will it be a fringe phenomenon only embraced by early adopters, trend-setters and bibliophiles who place a premium on convenience? Food for thought.

Thoughts on Business

Don’t let Damodaran and Nayyar Indoctrinate. Lechner may be right.

Operations and Strategy need not have to be diametrically opposed. In business school we often learn about the inherent tension between vision and action, between execution-focused business leaders and transformative visionaries. Many a VC class will remind you that the world divides neatly into builders and sustainers. The entrepreneur is the “ideas guy” and people with operational experience running businesses are better suited to grow a business. Mr. Bezos defies this conventional wisdom. He embodies both an obsession with analytical frameworks, numbers, quantitative analysis, operations (not too surprising given his stellar academic record at Princeton and time spent being a quant jock at D.E Shaw) and a bold, prophetic view on business and strategy. This personal schizophrenia is mirrored in Amazon as a company. The company is focused on iterative innovation and sticking to the fundamentals of the business model (their mantra: best selection, the lowest prices, and the cheapest and most-convenient delivery) but does not shy away from being bold and truly disruptive. Amazon Prime, The Mechanical Turk, their web services play etc. are all examples of bold business model innovation.

Transcending Competitive advantage is a legitimate goal

MBA’s are trained to think about strategy in terms of competitive advantage. Our own bespectacled Mr. Pravin Nayyar will publicly flog you if you stray from what you are good at and Mr. Damodaran will give you a million reasons why shareholders are better equipped than business managers to diversify their portfolios. While this is all true, Mr. Bezos thinks it is important to “transcend competitive advantage” and try new things for their own sake. He says “if you are unwilling to learn new skills, try new things, you will be outmoded.” He confesses to being a “change-junkie” and believes in experimentation as a central pillar of business. He talks about how businesses are never punished for Type two errors; more simply, companies are rarely criticized for the things they don’t try. To quote him verbatim: “Companies are rarely criticized for the things they fail to try; but they’re often criticized for the things they try that fail.”

According to him, learning how to manage the complexities associated with change can be as important, if not more important than mastery over a certain domain. Sounds oddly reminiscent of an MO class where Lechner gesticulates wildly and asserts that the ability to change and “flex new muscles” is of paramount importance when approaching a world plagued by uncertainties. 

Thoughts on Life Choices: The Helicopter Litmus Test

In 2003, Bezos chartered an Aerospatiale Gazelle helicopter in the remote reaches of southwest Texas and almost died when the pilot lost control and crashed. During the Q&A session, a member of the audience asked Jeff what thoughts ran through his head and what he learned from the experience. With a deadpan air of certitude, Jeff said “Lesson number one, don’t fly in helicopters, I have looked up the statistics on helicopters and they don’t look very promising” He then laughed explosively. On regaining his calm, he went on to explain that his first thought was whether or not he would have liked to have lived his life differently. He concluded nonchalantly that he was doing exactly what he loved and felt passionate about: Amazon! A morbid thought but many important life decisions take on clarity when subjected to the Helicopter Test: Jeff would not have lived any differently when faced with the opportunity to reassess his life in a helicopter about to crash! Mr. Bezos belongs to the charmed few who actively followed his passions and furthered the art by building something of real value.

If the Kindle takes off, he might just go down in the annals of history (next to Guttenberg perhaps) as the man who reinvented the book!

New York Indian Film Festival

 

Both my current roommates (Nadia Owusu and Anthony Koithra) produce and direct films. Two of their recent projects were being showcased at the New York Indian Film Festival. While Bollywood movies are watched all over the world and are hugely successful, they are  still formulaic and trite. Therefore, it is always nice to see aspiring south-asian filmmakers tackle more serious subjects and make films about universal themes.

Firebird (co-produced by Nadia) takes a fresh look at domestic violence and Somewhere Right Now (co-produced by Anthony) is a stark portrayal of American soldiers and their relationship with prisoners in captivity. In Firebird, the audience has no choice but to  demonize the abuser but in Somewhere Right Now, one begins to see glimpses of humanity in the female soldier who is deeply remorseful when she mechanically electrocutes a writhing and naked prisoner.

I also got to watch Noise an excellent short about three men in Bombay who find a bomb and don’t know what to do with it. Imagine Gods Must Be Crazy except that the Coke bottle falling from the sky is an uninginited RDX, Botswana is Bombay and the Bushmen are puerile Bombay “punters” worthy of the Darwin Awards!

At one point in the movie, one of the protagonists says “why don’t we bomb the train!” but then decides that it would be more fun to ignite the bomb in a fallow dry field outside the city. I think the point of the short was: really stupid people can do stupid things that seem demonic and evil. Touchy subject given the recent Bombay blasts.

At the festival, I heard a rumor that Mira Nair was going to work with  Salman Rushdie to make a movie adaptation of  Midnights Children. The last movie based on literature in the same genre (magical realism) I can think of was: Love in the Time of Cholera which was quite mediocre. However, I have full faith in Mira Nair. Her other critically acclaimed project (funded by the Gates Foundation) is on AIDS.

On a separate note, another great film I am excited to watch is Slumdog Millionaire.