Interview With Bill Gurley: The Guy Who Backed OpenTable, Yelp, GrubHub, Twitter, Zillow And Uber

What do OpenTable, Yelp, GrubHub, Twitter, Zillow, and Uber have in common? Bill Gurley, and of course his firm Benchmark.

In my opinion, Bill’s at the top of the top venture capitalists today. With a deep background in engineering, capital markets, and venture (not to mention basketball), he’s got all the bases covered when he talks to entrepreneurs about building great companies that will be successful for decades – not just years.

I was pleased that he was willing to answer some of the questions that most fascinate me about his biography and how he advises the companies he backs.

His answers follow below:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2014/08/26/interview-with-bill-gurley-the-guy-who-backed-opentable-yelp-grubhub-twitter-zillow-and-uber/

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13 Questions Every Leader Should Think About (Often)

Do you keep 50% of your time unscheduled?

This sounds like a strange question—in fact, for those of us with back-to-back meetings and to-do lists a mile long, it might sound downright silly.

But if you’re a manager, leader, or entrepreneur, it’s one worth pondering. As Dov Frohman explains in his book, Leadership the Hard Way, leaders with sufficient “slop” in their schedules can reflect on lessons they’ve learned and strategize for the future in a way that people with jam-packed schedules simply can’t.

This is just one of the incredibly insightful questions posed in Inc.’s compilation of “100 Great Questions Every Entrepreneur Should Ask”—a list featuring successful business leaders’ recommendations on what leaders of the future should be asking themselves regularly. While the quotes in the list can help entrepreneurs think through everything from competitive strategy to product innovation, we thought that some of the best tidbits were helpful takeaways for managers at any company and any level.

Here’s a quick a roundup of our (adapted) favorites from the list—to ask yourself today.

  1. What is it like to work for me?
  2. What prevents me from making the changes I know will make me a more effective leader?
  3. If no one would ever find out about my accomplishments, how would I lead differently?
  4. Did my employees make progress today?
  5. If I had to leave my organization for a year and the only communication I could have with employees was a single paragraph, what would I write?
  6. What did I miss in the interview for the worst hire I ever made?
  7. How is the way I think and process information affecting my organizational culture?
  8. Do my employees have the opportunity to do what they do best every day?
  9. Do I see more potential in people than they do in themselves?
  10. Why should people listen to me?
  11. How do I encourage people to take control and responsibility?
  12. Do I know what I’m doing? And who do I call if I don’t?

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Inside Google’s Secret Drone-Delivery Program

After two years of development, the Silicon Valley company reveals to The Atlantic that it has substantial research effort into building flying robots than can deliver products across a city in a minute or two.

A zipping comes across the sky.

A man named Neil Parfitt is standing in a field on a cattle ranch outside Warwick, Australia. A white vehicle appears above the trees, a tiny plane a bit bigger than a seagull. It glides towards Parfitt, pitches upwards to a vertical position, and hovers near him, a couple hundred feet in the air. From its belly, a package comes tumbling downward, connected by a thin line to the vehicle itself. Right before the delivery hits the ground, it slows, hitting the earth with a tap. The delivery slows, almost imperceptibly, just before it hits the ground, hardly kicking up any dust. A small rectangular module on the end of the line detaches the payload, and ascends back up the vehicle, locking into place beneath the nose. As the wing returns to flying posture and zips back to its launch point half a mile away, Parfitt walks over to the package, opens it up, and extracts some treats for his dogs.

The Australian test flight and 30 others like it conducted in mid-August are the culmination of the first phase of Project Wing, a secret drone program that’s been running for two years at Google X, the company’s whoa-inducing, long-range research lab.

Though a couple of rumors have escaped the Googleplex—because of courseGoogle must have a drone-delivery program—Project Wing’s official existence and substance were revealed today. I’ve spent the past week talking to Googlers who worked on the project, reviewing video of the flights, and interviewing other people convinced delivery by drone will work.

Taken with the company’s other robotics investments, Google’s corporate posture has become even more ambitious. Google doesn’t just want to organize all the world’s information. Google wants to organize all the world.

During this initial phase of development, Google landed on an unusual design called a tail sitter, a hybrid of a plane and a helicopter that takes off vertically, then rotates to a horizontal position for flying around. For delivery, it hovers and winches packages down to the ground. At the end of the tether, there’s a little bundle of electronics they call the “egg,” which detects that the package has hit the ground, detaches from the delivery, and is pulled back up into the body of the vehicle.

The Google delivery drone releasing a package (Google)

Read more : vhttp://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/inside-googles-secret-drone-delivery-program/379306/

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AMAZON: NOT AN E-COMMERCE COMPANY

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http://stratechery.com/2014/amazon-e-commerce-company/

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