Federico Jorge’s career as a copywriter started in creative agencies. Like many creative workers he moved from one agency to another before deciding he’d gained enough experience to work for himself. He set up his own agency in his small town in Argentina and soon found that business thrived. He served small businesses with simple needs, delivering the copy they required to build their companies...
In November 2022, shortly after Elon Musk became the new owner of Twitter, Robert Reich listed three things Musk didn’t understand. He suggested that first Musk didn’t recognize the value of the platform’s workers. So, second, when “he fired half” of them and “drove off even more, he wasn’t cutting costs.” And third, he didn’t understand that “he was actively destroying what he bought.” Musk...
Twenty-three years after launching his first start-up Reid Hoffman was still feeling the effects. The creation of SocialNet, a site that tried to combine social networking with dating services and a classifieds board, “was a lonely and stressful journey,” Hoffman wrote in 2020. The use of food as a stress relief, combined with the meals taken during recruitment and sales, meant that more than two...
In early November, as Elon Musk allowed anyone with eight bucks to buy a blue check mark, an account called @EliLillyandCo made a dramatic announcement. The pharmaceutical company was excited to declare that insulin was now free. As one responder put it, that would be “big if true.” Eli Lilly is one of the three main suppliers of insulin, delivering the life-saving hormone to more than 8.4...
After designer Casey Smith took a year-long maternity leave, she shut her business. Writing on her company’s blog in 2018, she describes the move as “a huge mistake.” When she re-opened, she found she had no plan, no marketing strategy, and heard nothing but crickets. “It was an awful experience that I would never want to relive,” she wrote. It was also a result that every business owner and...
As they prepared to make their funding pitch, Waze’s founders knew they had a valuable solution to a common problem. Their technology would present a map showing drivers which route to take to reach their destination. But by collating the driving speeds of all their users, the app would also pick the routes that avoided the worst traffic. Users would get where they wanted to go. They’d arrive in...
The Colorado Society of Certified Public Accountants is a long way from a start-up. The organization was founded in 1904 and aims to bring together its 7,600 professional accounting members, organize networking opportunities and provide training courses. But in 2018, the society underwent a small revolution. Instead of mailing out invoices and waiting for its members to mail back their dues in...
In April this year, Netflix delivered a twist that almost no one expected to a story that seemed destined for a happy ending. The story was its own and the twist was that the company had lost subscribers over the previous quarter. Wall Street had expected the streaming company to announce the addition of about 2.5 million new customers. Instead, Netflix declared that global subscriptions had...
The announcement marked the end of an era. It also marked down the value of Facebook by more than $200 billion. For the first time in its history, the social media company announced not a slowdown in user growth but a decline. Daily active users fell from 1.93 billion to 1.929 billion in the last three months of 2021. It was a small drop but big enough to knock 25 percent off the value of the...
The judgment was a long time coming, and it still might not be final. In March 2020, a US appeals court ruled that British rock band Led Zeppelin hadn’t stolen part of their song Stairway to Heaven. Randy Wolfe, a member of Spirit, a Los Angeles band, had claimed that Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and John Paul Jones had lifted a chord progression in Taurus, a song written by Wolfe...
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