You Only Have to Be Right Once: The Unprecedented Rise of the Instant Tech Billionaires - Hardcover

Lane, Randall

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1591847664 ISBN 13: 9781591847663

Verlag: PORTFOLIO, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

The ultimate insider look at the newest titans of techand what you can learn from their success

In 2007, twenty-one-year old David Karp launched Tumblr, a simple micro-blogging platform, on a whim. By 2012, it had become one of the top ten online destinations, drawing 170 million visitors. By 2013, Yahoo had acquired Tumblr for over $1 billion. Just like that, a kid who hadn’t even earned his high school diploma was worth over a quarter billion dollars. And he’s not the only one . . .

Silicon Valley’s newest billionaires represent a unique and unconventional breed of entrepreneur: young, bold, and taking the world by storm with their extreme speed, insatiable hunger, and progressive leadership. These whiz kids (and, to be fair, a few adults) have the hottest companies in the world. They are all turning just one brilliant insight or hook into money at a rate never before seen in human historycreating companies that, even with no revenue, garner insane valuations.

With unique insider access to the world’s most influential and wealthy entrepreneurs,Forbes has dug in to find what these super-entrepreneurs say about their own success. This book, introduced, edited, and updated byForbes editor Randall Lane, is the first comprehensive look at who these instant tech billionaires are and how they achieved their quick wins. With sixteen illuminating pieces, including two never-before published features, we get behind-the-scenes examinations of the founders of Spotify, Airbnb, Tumblr, Twitter, and more, including:

• Elon Musk: The billionaire founder of Paypal, electric carmaker Tesla, and private space company SpaceX. His extreme ambition is matched by his preternatural engineering mind; no wonder he was the model for Robert Downey Jr.’s portrayal of Iron Man.
• Evan Spiegel: The twenty-three-year old declined a $3 billion cash offer from Mark Zuckerberg, after making the mountain come to Mohammed (Snapchat’s HQ is in Los Angeles) an unheard of request from a young gun to one of the biggest players in Silicon Valley. The story of Snapchat’s origin is even wilder than Facebook’s, but Spiegel’s ability to parlay infamy and popularity into revenue is still up in the air, even as Snapchat’s valuation continues to grow.
• Alex Karp: An eccentric philosopher with almost no tech background turned a Peter Thiel backed venture, Palantir, into a data-mining champion, with clients like the NSA, the FBI, and the CIA. Amid heated privacy concerns, Karp continues to grow Palantir like crazy, to $196 million in funding and an estimated $1 billion in contracts in 2014.

You Only Have to Be Right Once is the definitive collection of everything we can learn from these incredible game changers and what their next moves spell for the future of business.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

RANDALLLANE is the editor of Forbes and the author of The Zeroes: My Misadventures in the Decade Wall Street Went Insane.

Since 1917, FORBES has provided leaders with strategic insight and information. The largest business magazine in the world,Forbes has 6.1 million readers in the United States and more than thirty international editions.

RANDALL LANE is the editor of Forbes and the author of The Zeroes: My Misadventures in the Decade Wall Street Went Insane.

Since 1917, FORBES has provided leaders with strategic insight and information. The largest business magazine in the world,Forbes has 6.1 million readers in the United States and more than thirty international editions.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

“I know exactly who you are,” Parker responded, quickly parrying with a short history of my personal background, Forbes’s position in the marketplace, and my stated goals for the magazine. He then explained his (typical) obsessiveness with a soliloquy that can be summed up in two words: Thank you.

It’s not that the Forbes cover had been a valentine: It revealed the polymath who had helped shape Napster, Facebook, and Spotify with all his quirks and faults. But until that story—viewed more than 700,000 times online and by millions more who saw the print magazine version—the world equated him with the villainous character portrayed by Justin Timberlake in David Fincher’s movie The Social Network. Even Mark Zuckerberg conceded the movie did Parker factual injustice. Reduced to an evil-businessman caricature, Parker had barricaded himself in LA’s Peninsula Hotel for two months, where he’d gained thirty pounds.

His twenty-two-year-old fiancée had helped him ditch the depression, and the weight. And so Parker stood before me, himself again, as a brash actor in a story that has only a little to do with Facebook and feels one hundred times bigger: how a handful of young digital swashbucklers shrugged off the Great Recession to transform how industries operate and fortunes get made.

The day after my conversation with Parker, Steve Jobs passed away. Jobs had epitomized the old new guard, one of a trinity of tech entrepreneurs—with Bill Gates and Michael Dell—who two generations earlier, while themselves in their twenties, proved the disruptive power of technology. Now Jobs was dead. Gates had become a full-time philanthropist. And Dell’s company, as with Apple and Microsoft, was viewed by this new generation as the bloated prey rather than the hungry predator.

This narrative isn’t new. The first half century of the American computer age has seen perennial waves of the young taking on the old. During my first go-around at Forbes, just out of college in the early nineties, I chronicled tech-savvy Generation X, which valued entrepreneurship over the corporate ladder and fueled the original dotcom boom and bust, carving out a handful of huge winners, notably Google and eBay, in the process.

In this round, however, the underlying drivers have accelerated exponentially. This new model of Young Turk isn’t merely comfortable with technology—he can’t remember a world without the Internet. Accordingly, he’s no longer content merely conquering the technology space—every industry is now the technology space, whether hotels or music or transportation. And thus ripe for pillaging.

Then there’s the cash. History will determine whether this proves to be yet another financial bubble—when a five-year-old taxi-sharing app, Uber, raises venture money at a $17 billion valuation, it’s hard to bet against that. But what’s undeniable is that we’re witnessing the most prodigious wealth machine in human history. Zuckerberg, worth some $30 billion on his thirtieth birthday, may be the poster boy for this new breed, but he’s far from an outlier. Almost a dozen Americans, ineligible by dint of age to serve as president, became self-made billionaires over the past five years. What’s more, no one in this cohort finds that particularly unusual—they pretty much feel entitled to it.

Youth, meanwhile, has officially ceased to be a disadvantage, upending pretty much the entirety of civilized history. Previously, whether you were a blacksmith or a lawyer, wisdom and experience rendered you more valuable as years went on. No longer. For the past twenty years, if your computer broke, you’d prefer that the twenty-five-year-old fix it rather than the fifty-five-year-old. For ten years, venture capitalists favored young “digital natives” over industry veterans, as long as the former got paired with an operational “adult.” We’ve now skipped the adult requirement. The kids are fully running the show.

And unlike the hedge fund managers of the previous decade, who were rightly perceived to have conjured their billions without actually creating anything (other than the complicated financial structures that wound up collapsing everything else), no one resents them for it. Quite the contrary, they glide across the country in their chartered Gulfstreams like folk heroes.

The white hats stem from the perception of meritocracy. The high stakes put a premium on ideas and technical execution, rather than connections and salesmanship. As you turn the pages of this book, there’s a far higher correlation between financial success and a stint as a teen hacker than having daddy’s name on a building at Harvard. The engineers have trumped the salesmen. Sexism remains embedded in the coder-boy set (it’s not by choice that this book is chock-a-block with guys; very few women have launched major tech-enabled start-ups). But just ask Jan Koum or Pejman Nozad or Daniel Ek—the American Dream has never been more vivid. The only nepotism, as best as I can tell, comes from being the catalyst’s roommate, buddy, or frat brother. (In the 2010s, there’s no sweeter title than “co-founder.”) It’s hard to resent someone when you had the same shot at the brass ring.

To me, however, the ultimate commonality across all these chapters, the one that lets them reap adulation, boils down to individualism. The post-meltdown recovery has proven among the most tepid in national history, especially the job market. Where others see a paralysis-inducing world, these guys see a gold rush, and they take action. They’d all rather regret the things they did than what they didn’t do. Jobs and Gates and Dell made dropping out acceptable; among this group, it’s cool, a badge of honor. (Snapchat’s Evan Spiegel dropped out of Stanford in the middle of a class, a month before graduation . . . on principle.)

Failure is an acceptable option. There’s hardly anyone in this book who hasn’t tasted it. Venture capitalists, in fact, view failure as an asset, and fund based on whether you’ve had the good fortune to make mistakes on someone else’s dime. The entire VC ecosystem is based on flops: the idea that a one-in-ten success ratio is fine, as long as that success is a blockbuster. You only have to be right once. The greatest successes come when people aren’t afraid to fail—a decidedly American outlook that explains why almost every innovation of the Internet era has sprung from this country.

Credit belongs to the Forbes writers and researchers who brought forward—and home—this endless parade of digital robber barons: George Anders, Victoria Barrett, Jeff Bercovici, Steve Bertoni, Abram Brown, J. J. Colao, Hannah Elliott, David Ewalt, Tomio Geron, Andy Greenberg, Ryan Mac, Parmy Olson, and Eric Savitz. This book, to a large degree, is yours. Thanks at Penguin’s Portfolio imprint go to Adrian Zackheim, Natalie Horbachevsky, and Will Weisser, who instantly grasped the power and importance of what we’d assembled, and scrambled with the speed of a start-up to get this to market. At Forbes, two people deserve a special call-out: Lewis D’Vorkin, Forbes’s chief product officer, whose return to Forbes four years ago brought a refocus on chronicling people-based entrepreneurial capitalism—he set the stage for the stories that infuse this book; and Bruce Upbin, who as managing editor oversees Forbes’s technology coverage—he was at the genesis of almost all of these profiles.

For the past three years, my job has...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: PORTFOLIO
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1591847664
• ISBN 13: 9781591847663
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 208
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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