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Coming from a semi business background, I can say I've learned a lot more in business than purely relates to those 3 charts. He barely touched on accounting, f

by yosho 16y ago

Coming from a semi business background, I can say I've learned a lot more in business than purely relates to those 3 charts. He barely touched on accounting, financials, and economics. He didn't talk about organizational behavior, effective management, and team structure. Sometimes, I feel like everyone dismisses business because a lot of it isn't that quantifiable... but really, the difficulty of business is IN the fact that most of the skills involved can't be quantified.

nielr1 16y ago
The reason that i didn't touch on any of these things is that the necessary skills for them all (that you mention and many more) are relative to a point in time and very much related to the charts i talked about. Let's use an example: what's "the right" organizational structure. By definition it changes as a company grows. An organization will need to be structured differently at 3 people, 12 people, 30 people, 65 people, etc.. This is, in fact, a demonstration of understanding the S-curve and how it applies all over a business. Something parochial like accounting is actually the same thing. The complexity of our accounting (and need for systems, experts, auditing, etc..) was directly related to us hitting a network effect in our business. As they say - you can run accounting of a bad business really well. I'm not disagreeing with you just noting that my piece was much more about how to recognize patterns that emerge in a business everywhere and know which pattern you're working with to make tactical and strategic decisions at the right time. I've written quite a bit about financials, the economics of startups, etc.. Here is a good example about business model integrity on my blog: http://parallax.blogs.com/parallax_calculating_tech/2006/05/why_every_entre.html http://parallax.blogs.com/parallax_calculating_tech/2006/05/...

by yosho 16y ago

nielr1 16y ago

The reason that i didn't touch on any of these things is that the necessary skills for them all (that you mention and many more) are relative to a point in time and very much related to the charts i talked about. Let's use an example: what's "the right" organizational structure. By definition it changes as a company grows. An organization will need to be structured differently at 3 people, 12 people, 30 people, 65 people, etc.. This is, in fact, a demonstration of understanding the S-curve and how it applies all over a business. Something parochial like accounting is actually the same thing. The complexity of our accounting (and need for systems, experts, auditing, etc..) was directly related to us hitting a network effect in our business. As they say - you can run accounting of a bad business really well. I'm not disagreeing with you just noting that my piece was much more about how to recognize patterns that emerge in a business everywhere and know which pattern you're working with to make tactical and strategic decisions at the right time. I've written quite a bit about financials, the economics of startups, etc.. Here is a good example about business model integrity on my blog: http://parallax.blogs.com/parallax_calculating_tech/2006/05/why_every_entre.html http://parallax.blogs.com/parallax_calculating_tech/2006/05/...