74 Quotes by Brad Stone

Great merchants have never had the opportunity to understand their customers in a truly individualized way,” he said. “E-commerce is going to make that possible.”13.

We all know that if you swing for the fences, you’re going to strike out a lot, but you’re also going to hit some home runs. The difference between baseball and business, however, is that baseball has a truncated outcome distribution. When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is four. In business, every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score 1,000 runs. This long-tailed distribution of returns is why it’s important to be bold.

There's a new set of transformative technologies such as machine learning, AI, and virtual reality that will spawn another set of big tech franchises. But in terms of cultural impact, perhaps we are at peak Valley.

The one thing that Airbnb had was, Brian and Joe were designers, and they did a great job. They also had Nate Blecharczyk, who was the CTO, who I describe his history as a high schooler and at Harvard as really a creator of tools for spammers.

For decades, technology entrepreneurship has been revered, and people like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk were heroes.

Certainly some hosts on Airbnb are opening up their spare bedrooms to meet new people; and some drivers use Uber to carpool with strangers for the companionship. But the most productive members of each community are professional operators, making available their homes or cars as a way to earn or supplement a living.

With tough interpretation of taxi and zoning regulations, neither Uber nor Airbnb would have gotten started. By the time many cities recognized their existence, both were fairly large and had the political support of their customers.

Airbnb's genius was moving into cities and recognizing that millennials would want to go and maybe spend a vacation or visit some friends in an urban center.

Executives are rarely comfortable speaking on the record, particularly in secretive Silicon Valley companies.