Quotes by Professor Hoffman

“Within such places, some of those on sale were considered more desirable if they possessed abnormalities, exactly what the Professor wished to find.””

“Harvard Business School professor and author Clay Christensen believes that you need to focus on the concept of the “job-to-be-done”; that is, when a customer buys a product, she is “hiring” it to do a particular job. Then there’s Brian Chesky of Airbnb, who said simply, “Build a product people love. Hire amazing people. What else is there to do? Everything else is fake work.” As Andrea Ovans aptly put it in her January 2015 Harvard Business Review article, “What Is a Business Model?”, it’s enough to make your head swim! For the purposes of this book, we’ll focus on the basic definition: a company’s business model describes how it generates financial returns by producing, selling, and supporting its products. What sets companies like Amazon, Google, and Facebook apart, even from other successful high-tech companies, is that they have consistently been able to design and execute business models with characteristics that allow them to quickly achieve massive scale and sustainable competitive advantage. Of course, there isn’t a single perfect business model that works for every company, and trying to find one is a waste of time. But most great business models have certain characteristics in common. If you want to find your best business model, you should try to design one that maximizes four key growth factors and minimizes two key growth limiters.””

“In 2014, Aswath Damodaran, a professor of finance at NYU’s Stern School of Business, estimated that Uber was probably worth roughly $ 6 billion, based on its ability to ultimately win 10 percent of the global taxi market of $ 100 billion, or $ 10 billion. According to Uber’s own projections, in 2016 the company processed over $ 26 billion in payments. It’s safe to say that the $ 10 billion market was a serious underestimate, as the ease of use and lower cost of Uber and its competitors expanded the market for transportation-as-a-service.””