This is very similar to an except in Derek Sivers book on cdbaby.com. (CD Baby let independent artists sell their music CDs on the site long before iTunes). In it, he writes:
At a conference in Los Angeles, someone in the audience asked me, "What if
every musician just set up their own store on their own website? Since that'd
be the death of CD Baby, how do you plan to stop that?"
I said, "Honestly, I don't care about CD Baby. I only care about the musicians.
If some day, musicians don't need CD Baby anymore, that's great! I'll just shut
it down and get back to making music."
He was shocked. He had never heard a business owner say he didn't care about
the survival of his company.
To me, it was just common sense. Of course you should care about your customers
more than you care about yourself! Isn't that rule #1 of providing a good
service? *It's all about them, not you.*
The original creator of the company will care about that because they know why they are trying to solve the problem. Everyone that comes after will not. This is natural. Everyone after sees the validation of the product as a validation of a money printing machine and will look to run just that - a money printing machine.
Hate to deify a Steve Jobs, as if he needs more god-like overtures, but that is what will always make him different than your Tim Cooks of the world (or your Sundar Pichais of the world as opposed to Larry or Sergey, your Activision-Blizzard management versus just the original Blizzard team).
Two completely different types of animals. In a sense, that’s why we usually describe this loss as a company’s soul leaving it. The why goes missing and the what, which is always money, is all that’s left.
I'm racking my brain trying to remember where I heard it, but I've heard it roughly summarized as: Companies are founded by people who are loyal to a vision, but tend to promote people who are loyal to the company. Eventually the people who are loyal to the company have all of the power. The people loyal to the vision are only left in the lower ranks, if at all.
At least people who are loyal to the company care about the long term viability of the company. I think Cook, Nadella and Jassy (my skip*7 manager) care about the company. I don’t know what the hell Pichai cares about.
Google has the focus and the vision of a crack addled flea.
Google was organized such that the founder didn't have to do much, but that also means that the CEO doesn't have much power to run things so Pichai would need to rebuild the whole company to start to change how things are run.
This is the reason why Google can launch so many products, but also why they can cancel so many products: there is no person holding the reins and instead middle managers just go off and do their own thing. Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook all have a clear power center created by the founders, Google doesn't have that which is why they are so much more unpredictable.
It seems like the best model of Sundar Pichai's behavior is someone who myopically cares about his own career. He puts most of his effort into looking smart and avoiding offending people.
Honestly, Ruth Porat seems to run most of the impactful decisions at the C-level, and that's a good thing.
The shareholders won't care about that, but a private owned company can care about it. Even successors. Startups generally attempt to become publicly owned, so they use bait and switch. And most fail anyway (to become a unicorn). However, even a CEO can care about it, its just that they ultimately fall under authority of the shareholders / board.
Right. Well I think that’s one of the reasons Musk doesn’t take Spacex public. The why he operates under is very much not palatable for any reasonable shareholder. Shareholders would want to scale out space deployments of practical things (satellites) and focus on that. If they knew Musk’s why, which is to get to Mars, well … well I mean that’s just crazy. What board is going to go for that?
Out of sight? He talks about it publicly and constantly (at lease he used to. Before Tesla and then Twitter started occupying more of his attention).
Shareholders can be told that they are aiming at Mars, full stop. As long as they don't control the voting and were told that before they bought the shares, it's fine.
I don’t disagree with what you’re trying to say, but keep in mind that SpaceX still has shareholders, and a board. It’s a much more limited and vetted set of investors, but very much not a closely-held corporation or anything like it.
> a private owned company can care about it. Even successors.
In theory, but rarely in practice. I've seen a lot of private, family-owned businesses go out of business or get sold after the son/successor takes over because of exactly the phenomenon jesuscript mentions. Even if the successor cares, they don't care about the same things as the founder.
I think it is extremely unlikely that Jobs would have said well then we just shut down Apple if there is not a need for us anymore. From what I have read he was a business man first. He also very clearly had a very good sense of product quality and was good enough technically to understand not only what was possible, but what was going to be possible in 5 years. But that he was all about the users needs and not himself is not something I think the facts bear out.
Seems like everyone was treating the non-founder Jobs as being typical of a founder to me. If he had stayed at Apple instead of going off to do Next he would have been more typical and probably have still been bad at quality and focused on slimy sales tricks.
He's really more an example of someone who was forced to correct some pretty massive defects and lack of vision in important areas where most lottery winning founding CEOs will never get corrections.
I would be kind of curious but I found it very funny if he wasn't a black mark against Next hardware back then given that workstation users were already going to see consumer as cheap even if he didn't have a reputation for cheapening his line further.
Really I think his behavior was much more inline with Cook than his earlier self once he was successful and founder envy was more an external benefit than related to some actual behavior he had.
> The original creator of the company will care about that because they know why they are trying to solve the problem. Everyone that comes after will not.
A good follow up question is why not make CD Baby a non-profit instead of for-profit? Being a non-profit foundation would telegraph to everyone, including future leadership, where their priorities should lie.
A non-profit is largely motivated to stay alive, just like a for-profit, but mainly does it by asking for money from rich people rather than selling things.
Also, the extra accounting and regulation is intense for a small organization.
Much of the wealth a non-profit generates can get lost on large salaries and expense accounts. A charity might have more rules and send a stronger signal.
But having said that the creator could make tons of money and then shut it down because it is not needed. That's perfectly logical
It helps that CDBaby was handling a lot of stuff that musicians didn't want to do themselves. They were happy to outsource it. If the alternative were easy, people would already have done it.
That wasn't what CDBaby lost to. They lost to the fact that CDs disappeared. CDBaby had a great business, removing a pain point, and they could genuinely want that pain point to go away entirely.
Such are the best possible businesses, genuinely caring about your customers while having enough moat to avoid being undercut tomorrow. Not all businesses can do that, regardless of the best intentions of management.
This isn't intended to reflect on any particular business owner. But I have yet to hear any business owner announce "We are totally motivated by greed, and will screw over our customers and partners to make money". Elizabeth Holmes said a lot of touchy-feely stuff. So I wouldn't put much weight in what any business owner says about their motivation.
Lots of business owners end up treating their businesses as their kids in the sense that they see them as extensions of themselves primarily, rather than their own thing. This, of course, is deeply narcissistic and hurts everyone in the vicinity.
> What if every musician just set up their own store on their own website?
Can anyone imagine the hell that would be "every musician setting up their own website?" Centralization offers a lot of benefits to the users. I can buy CDs of multiple artists at the same time. I can find similar artists (there's a natural competition here). None of this one password per artist. There's a reduced security risk for me buying from a centralized service (just need to trust one site instead of hundreds, and specifically small artists that might not know things). I definitely would not have answered that question so well.
> Of course you should care about your customers more than you care about yourself! Isn't that rule #1 of providing a good service? It's all about them, not you.
If you good-service yourself into being unprofitable and eventually bankrupt, it's not good for yourself and eventually your customers as well.
