Om Malik

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I wrote a blog entry on Om Malik's presentation. at Startup School.

ptufts.blogspot.com/2006/04/om-maliks-advice-to-startups....

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Jutta @ flickr says:

I guess this guy must be a great entertainer, because reading your blog entry, I don't quite understand your enthusiasm for this speaker.

"If we forget about money, we get companies like Enron, WorldCom, and Pets.com!"
Don't Enron and WorldCom strike you as having been exclusively about money?

Here's an experiment: the next time you run into someone who says they knows the rules for success, ask them to make a prediction about the future, not just explain in hindsight why existing successful products "made it".
Posted 27 months ago. ( permalink )

ptufts says:

Yes, he is a great entertainer. He used that to get across simple but important lessons, one of these being that if you ignore money, you are not building a business. In the Enron and Woldcom cases, sure, they thought about money, but not how their business would make it in a sustainable, legitimate way. In each of those cases, the businesses made money by scamming -- in other words, the businesses themselves were broken. The reports of Enron after its collapse said that its trading floors (where it was supposed to make its money) were empty, and that they would staff these with staff from random departments whenever visitors arrived to give them a big show.

Pets.com had the same problem from another angle -- sending 50lb bags of kitty litter with free shipping could never be profitable. Had they focused on the fundamentals of the business, and not tried to sell every unprofitable pet product, they would have had a shot.

I'm sure if asked, Om could predict which companies are more likely to succeed than to fail based on their approach to money. It's not a difficult analysis -- when you see a company spending significant revenue on things that do not offer a return, you know that they are not optimizing their chances of success.
Posted 27 months ago. ( permalink )

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Om Malik

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Jutta @ flickr says:

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