venturing.in

You can certainly have a situation where there’s absolutely no growth in a business and it’s a much better investment than some company that’s going to grow at very substantial rates — particularly if they’re going to need capital in order to grow. There’s a huge difference between the business that grows and requires lots of capital to do so and the business that grows and doesn’t require capital. And, generally, financial analysts don’t apply adequate weight to the difference between those. In fact, it’s amazing how little attention is paid to that.

– Warren Buffett

When constrained systems, those hungry for natural disorder, collapse, as they are eventually bound to, since they are fragile, failure is never seen as the result of fragility. Rather, such failure is interpreted as the product of poor forecasting. As with a crumbling sand pile, it would be unintelligent to attribute the collapse of a fragile bridge to the last truck that crossed it, and even more foolish to try to predict in advance which truck might bring it down. Yet it is done all too often.

– Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile

What you want is products that are bought, not sold.

– Andy Rachleff

Well, I send a letter to the managers and I talk to them about widening the moat. I say it isn’t the question of the earnings per share this quarter or anything like that. Any business that has a widening moat is gonna make a lot of money over time. They are guardians of the moat. I say a great business is like an economic castle. And if you have an economic castle in capitalism, there gonna be a bunch of people that are going to try and take it away from you. So I need a knight in that castle, the manager, who worries about protecting that castle all the time. And then I want this moat around it, and I want that moat to get wider. It may be service, it may be better product design, all kinds of things. It can be what’s in their mind about the product, a consumer product. But I want that moat to be widening. And I want people to toss sharks and piranha, octopus, everything into that moat to keep away those competitors because they’re gonna be coming and our managers are charged with that. I tell our managers, pretend that this is the only business that you and your family can own for the next hundred years, you can’t sell it and you’ve got to make this one work. And that means every day thinking about what’s going to make it a great business over a 100 years.

– Warren Buffett

True creativity is characterised by a succession of acts each dependent on the one before and suggesting the one after. This kind of cumulative creativity led to the development of Polaroid photography.

– Edwin Land

Organisms that treat threats as more urgent than opportunities have a better chance to survive and reproduce.

– Daniel Kahneman

It’s impossible for anything rational to successfully evolve because the byproduct of being optimally rational and efficient is that you’d be predictable. If you are completely predictable, you’d be dead. The military do not look for the most efficient route from A to B, because the most efficienct route would be the one that’s most heavily guarded. So there is a huge danger in looking at life as if it’s an optimization problem. At some point our psychology has to have evolved to be a bit weird and random and unpredictable, for the simple reason that someone who’s predictable would be deceased.

– Rory Sutherland

When an industry goes through a strategic inflection point, the practitioners of the old art may have trouble. On the other hand, the new landscape provides an opportunity for people, some of whom may not even be participants in the industry in question, to join and become part of the action….Few of the top ten participants in the new horizontal computer industry rose from the ranks of the old vertical computer industry, bearing testimony to the observation that it is truly difficult for a successful industry participant to adapt to a completely different industry structure.

– Andy Grove

“The system we designed, of being able to see across asset classes and controlling risk, informed us where we should be and not be, which enabled us to grow very large-scale businesses with a small number of people. I think for people who weren’t set up like that, it was much more difficult.

…we didn’t get into trouble, which is very important in finance. Because if you get in trouble in finance, you have only so many people working at your firm. If they’re all working on messes, they can’t be doing investments; there isn’t enough bandwidth. So part of what benefited us was that we’re risk-averse. I have a saying: There are no brave old people in finance. Because if you’re brave, you mostly get destroyed in your 30s and 40s. If you make it to your 50s and 60s and you’re still prospering, you have a very good sense of how to avoid problems and when to be conservative or aggressive with your investments.”

– Steve Schwarzman