No, but I bet he could talk about the messy complexities of the Apple supply chain. Can technical CEOs do that?
My point isn't to get into a skills based dick measuring contest, but rather to point out that even at huge technology companies*, is being technically adept really a requirement for the job?
Another one for discussion: is Apple a "technology" company? I put forth that a company is defined by the most difficult problem they need to solve / continually solve in order to stay in business. That tells me Apple is more of a manufacturing/ marketing company than technology.
I wasn't saying Tim Cook is lacking in skills. As the CEO of one of the world's most successful companies he certainly has his own unique and impressive skills.
Lisa Su demonstrated an impressive skill not every CEO could pull off and I wanted to highlight that. That's all.
Whether being technically adept is a requirement or not, I'd say no in general for tech companies (and I'd count Apple as one) but for a certain subset of the tech companies (AMD, Tesla) it certainly seems to help.
Most products I've seen are "good enough" and have trade-offs with their competition. Infrequently have I seen a product that's head and shoulders above.
So companies get the checkboxes in features, then when I'm deciding between the finalists, stuff like this is a tie-break.
In other words, company culture is a differentiator, especially in a commodity product market.
I disagree on this. The companies culture is only a matter in terms of how it manifests within the product itself and the things around the product. It isn't THE product.
I don't buy a product because their CEO's salary is public and I can see what I'd make there in a hugely arbitrary / convoluted form based salary metric. I buy because the product is good and support is good.
In the case where your device was compromised and used in a botnet attack, wouldn't you need to prove damages? I'm just curious what that argument would look like to a layperson.
I suspect the average person wouldn't get too riled up to hear that their internet connection was used to block someone's website, as long as they don't notice it in their service quality.
Another tangent -- do any sophisticated botnet systems throttle their connection during an attack to minimize impact on the device/network owner?
[edit - in case it's not clear, I'm admittedly ignorant about this kind of stuff, so I was just curious if anyone else can shed some light]
My best tip is to not try one thing to grow your startup. Try everything.
This means that you have to do things very, very cheaply. Think of each growth hack as a single tactic. Execute in < 10 hours of work. Push into the wild.
You cannot know what will work, before you try it. What worked for others won't necessarily work for you.
How do you live in a world where any one thing you do is 90% likely to fail? You do a lot of 'one things', very cheaply, and when one of them hits, you exploit it.
Growth is a process, one very much dependent on speed. Think in terms of a growth system, not growth tactic or hack.
I disagree with the "try everything" part. Startups are resource constrained, and can't afford the time or money to try everything.
(In marketing, the world of "everything" is pretty substantial, and few of the channels can be properly tested cheaply: paid and organic search, paid and organic social (which includes many different platforms), email, old-school (e.g., print, radio, and TV) media buys, ...the list goes on.)
A smart and experienced marketer will know the tools and techniques for deconstructing what channels are the most successful for direct competitors. They'll also be able to figure out the niche channels where the target audience "hangs out" that competitors haven't yet discovered.
tl;dr: Don't try everything. Hire a marketer who will help you skip the guessing game and target the already-proven channels in your market.
If you are serious with your question, instead of just trying to jockey for hacker forum dominance, a very quick google search will answer your question. It is possible that I misunderstood your Q, and your tone, and if so, I apologize.
I searched google.com for "increased antibiotic resistance over time" and found two sources that seem pretty legit. One is the World Health Organization, the other is the US National Library of Medicine. Both articles appear to address the question I believe you raised.
Thank you! My key question was less around increasing numbers of antibiotic-resistant pathogens and more toward the claim that antibiotics released today produce resistant strains faster than ones produced say fifty years ago. The timeline in your second link should help me piece that together...
This is called a "moat". Build it for your company, it's a good thing for an entrepreneur.
To be significantly successful, you need to stop thinking this way. Start thinking about what benefits you & your company.
It may seem like contempt for the consumer, and perhaps it is. But it's also possible the consumer is irrational and you can benefit in the short and long term.
I work in marketing, and have seen scant evidence for the value of a "brand". It's mostly branding people making an argument that comic sans devalues our brand, whereas the data clearly shows it doesn't.
The "long term harm" argument is indistinguishable from "i know better than you and I want it this way." It may be true, but it's unprovable.
> I work in marketing, and have seen scant evidence for the value of a "brand"
To what do you attribute the success of, say Coca Cola, rather than generic cola? Price and a good distribution network? Surely brand must contribute a little.
I don't know much about how branding works at that scale. But I don't think it's very effective for small/medium companies, and can be quite a money sink.
In nearly every SMB branding exercise/project I've participated in, the need for a brand, and the benefits it provides, are entirely limited to the egos of the employees.
I have seen this "we can't measure branding but we can measure conversion rates so let's optimize optimize optimize" approach borne out to create some of the worst websites. High converting, surely, but spammy, ugly, constantly trying to jam you into the funnel, full of dark patterns etc. Usually utterly forgettable, but often memorable for how crappy the experience is.
In my experience companies that do this are thinking very short term: how many people can we get through our funnel this month and how much money can we make from them? Yes it's hard to measure 'long term harm', but to assume it doesn't exist because it can't be directly measured makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot.
To me it is worth aspiring to be respected as a business. Obviously not to the point of letting your business fail because you obsessed over branding while nobody actually bought your product, but as a larger goal. A business that tries to squeeze customers for all it can and achieves grudging acceptance isn't something I aspire to be a part of.
The problem with a brand is that you don't know if it's the most effective use of the resources that go into it.
Coca Cola has nearly infinite resources, compared to the jobs I've worked (<$75mm annual revenue).
Even then, can they prove the value of their brand is an effective use of their marketing dollars? What I've read has a lot of correlations that could be explained by other causes.
It's difficult to measure the value of a brand, and most companies don't bother. It's expensive, because you have to pay actual people to talk to other people in a systematic way, over a long period of time.
Brand awareness is the measurement of the degree to which potential customers know that your product or service is an option when they are ready to make a purchase. You can't measure it from your marketing interactions alone, because the data set of your interactions is biased toward potential customers who are already aware of you. You can only measure it by performing statistically valid sampling of potential customers. The business purpose of measuring awareness is to help you find customers who have never interacted with your brand.
Brand affinity is the measurement of the degree to which potential customers have an emotional attachment to your product or service. A good shorthand is the degree to which a potential customer thinks of themselves as a "________ person." Think of a dude in a pickup truck saying "I'm a Ford guy, they've never let me down," or a person who won't even look at a phone that is not an iPhone. Again--the only way to measure this is by performing statistically valid sampling of potential customers. Measuring your marketing interactions alone will give you an artificially high measure of your affinity.
Design standards are important to both awareness and affinity.
A standard look helps the customer make mental connections between all the various times they've been exposed to your brand--this raises awareness. Comic Sans is not necessarily bad for awareness as long as you use it consistently in an intentional way. Randomly varying your fonts is bad, though, because it makes you "look" like several different brands, which means you will need to deliver more interactions to raise awareness.
Comic sans also might harm certain affinities, for example along the lines of being "sophisticated" or "beautiful." If a customer wants to think of themselves as sophisticated, they will seek brands that also present themselves that way. You're not going to see Mercedes Benz, which depends heavily on affinities of sophistication and elegance, using Comic Sans. You might see Scion, which depends on affinities of quirkiness and irony, use it. But again, the point is to be intentional.
Companies that are good at branding tend to be good either because they measure it compulsively (example: Proctor and Gamble), or because they are good at making internal opinionated decisions that stick (example: Apple).
Either way, the day to day operation of a strong brand does indeed look like a few people within a company telling everyone else what they can and cannot do with design.
Thank you for taking the time to write this. Honestly, it makes a lot of sense.
I don't have any experience with billion dollar companies. Have you worked in the industry and seen how they measure their campaign efficacies in huge companies? I bet it's really different than what I've seen.
Based on what I've seen, it's a lot of story telling that "branding" works. The question is, does it work better than if the company had put those resources into other avenues? Improve the product. Decrease the cost to consumer. Better customer service.
Here's a good cro vs. branding article, check out the Intel Inside section. [0].
There's a lot of money being made by people working in branding. If their field actually wasn't very effective, I wonder if it would be possible for them to accept it. I generally wouldn't want to find out that my career has essentially been a waste, and I created no value. (insert sinclair quote here)
My point isn't to get into a skills based dick measuring contest, but rather to point out that even at huge technology companies*, is being technically adept really a requirement for the job?
Another one for discussion: is Apple a "technology" company? I put forth that a company is defined by the most difficult problem they need to solve / continually solve in order to stay in business. That tells me Apple is more of a manufacturing/ marketing company than technology.