Eat People: And Other Unapologetic Rules for Game-Changing Entrepreneurs

194 Pages·2011·0.74 MB·English

by  Andy Kessler

Table of Contents

Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication

RULE #1 - If It Doesn’t Scale, It Will Get Stale
RULE #2 - Waste What’s Abundant to Make Up for What’s Scarce
RULE #3 - When in Doubt, Get Horizontal
RULE #4 - Intelligence Moves Out to the Edge of the Network
RULE #5 - Wealth Comes from Productivity; Everything Else Is Gravy
RULE #6 - Adapt to Humans; Don’t Make Them Adapt to You
RULE #7 - Be Soylent—Eat People
RULE #8 - Markets Make Better Decisions Than Managers
RULE #9 - Embrace Exceptionalism
RULE #10 - Be a Market Entrepreneur and Attack Political Entrepreneurs
RULE #11 - Use Zero Marginal Cost to Create a Flood (or Someone Else Will)
RULE #12 - Create Your Own Scarcity with a Virtual Pipe
BONUS RULE - Money Sloshes to the Highest Returns

How Many?
Hackers vs. Slackers
INDEX

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First published in 2011 by Portfolio / Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Copyright © Andy Kessler, 2011
All rights reserved
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA Kessler, Andy.
Eat people : unapologetic rules for entrepreneurial success / Andy Kessler.
p. cm.
Includes index.
eISBN : 978-1-101-47562-1
1. Entrepreneurship. 2. Technological innovations—Economic aspects.
3. New products. 4. Value. 5. Economics. I. Title.
HB615.K396 2011
658.4’09—dc22 2010039727
Set in Minion

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To Brett, Ryan, Kurt, and Kyle.
I wrote this for you.
Something from Nothing

I’VE SEEN IT HAPPEN SO MANY TIMES.
Someone comes up with a great idea and changes the world.
The next big thing.
I met Michael Dell by phone in his dorm room where he was selling PCs and
then met him in person well before Dell Inc. completely changed how personal
computers were sold. By getting rid of an entire swath of middlemen, and
lowering prices for all of us, he turned himself into a multibillionaire.
I met Steve Jobs as he was getting thrown out of Apple, and once more as he
headed back in, when he expanded the company’s mission from designing
computers to MP3 players and then smart phones and tablets that have made it
easier for all of us to get information by voice or by Web wherever we might
find ourselves. He got rich—and you and I got richer lives.
I met Ed Catmull while sitting on the floor at LAX waiting for a delayed flight
back to SFO. Pixar was working on its first feature film, Toy Story, which
pioneered a whole new way to tell compelling stories. He (and Steve Jobs) got
rich, but the rest of us got to see spectacular movies for ten bucks. Quite the
bargain.
I met Carl Rosendahl, whose Pacific Data Images was doing similar things for
Jeffrey Katzenberg and DreamWorks with a project called Shrek.
I met Larry Ellison as he was selling databases to corporations, when it wasn’t
so obvious that he was going to completely transform their back offices,
squeezing out costs in their finance and supply chains and making them much
more productive. Oracle saved businesses a fortune, and they passed the savings
along to the rest of us in the form of everything from cheap goods at Walmart to
cheap trades at Charles Schwab. Sure, Larry got rich—after all, he saved these
companies a ton of money. But he made the rest of us rich, too. As costs go
down, all of us get wealthier.
I’ve met Bill Gates many times, first after Microsoft went public. Gates was
pitching Wall Street about upgrading to Windows from DOS (without much
luck). Eventually, Wall Street discovered spreadsheets, which lowered their costs
and made it vastly easier to do things like take two companies or two financial
instruments and merge them into something financeable.
I met Gordon Moore and Andy Grove and Bob Noyce, the founders of Intel,
just as they almost lost out to cheap Japanese memory makers—before turning
the massive company on a dime to sell processors (at high margins) to the IBMs