In the commercial world, big companies mostly die within a few decades because they cannot maintain an internal system to keep them aligned to reality plus startups pop up.
The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You're encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren't that smart, who aren't that creative.
The social marketing teams of big companies will always figure out a way to advertise on Snapchat. I'd like to create a space for people who have a lot of talent but not a lot of reach.
Google started out when the dot-com boom was happening. It grew under the radar of big companies that were competing in but basically ignoring search. Then they were able to really invest during the bust for a long time.
I suspect there's a lot of validity to the premise that big companies aren't going to attract entrepreneurial talent.
We as Americans assume that big companies are bad, and big power companies are even worse.
I feel the same way about makeup that I do about food - I don't want the big companies to give me my food. I want the niche mom and pops who care about their food making it. I don't want the Kraft cheese, I want the niche cheese.
I hear my own daughters talking about big companies polluting the environment, and then I realise they are talking about companies of which one I am running. But when I tell them to read the things we are doing, then they realise we are doing good things. But millennials are really a great lot.
Well all the big companies are really panicked by the internet thing and all that, and sales went down, although sales have gone up again in this country a bit and also the big companies, because they're so big, they need big sales really so they're not really interested.
When we first started our internet company, 'China Pages', in 1995, and we were just making home pages for a lot of Chinese companies. We went to the big owners, the big companies, and they didn't want to do it. We go to state-owned companies, and they didn't want to do it. Only the small and medium companies really want to do it.
