Perhaps you wished for clear blue waters in the canals of Venice, carless streets in NYC, clear skies, and low pollution in LA, Mumbai, and Shanghai. But not this way, caused by an invisible virus. As I walk the empty perfect streets of NYC, I’m reminded of one of my…

I’m noticing that I’m questioning my assumptions about people and places as this crisis reaches the peak week in New York. We hope. I’m noticing people, places, jobs, sectors and systems that I am considering in an entirely new light. Some of my long-held beliefs are changing. I’m also recognizing…

This is the second in our series of Tech Titans, innovation, and business models. (Check out the first on Amazon). We turn our attention to Facebook’s 2018 Year End financials. Did you give up Facebook after the privacy, democracy, and lobbying issues Facebook faced last year? Well, you didn’t put…

Hi I’m Jen van der Meer. And forgive me. I’m a bit obsessed with Amazon. Amazon just reported 2018 financials. They crushed it. As you know, Amazon is a juggernaut. We often lump Apple, Amazon, and Alphabet together with even Facebook or Netflix. But nothing is like Amazon. Amazon is complexity. And the most ingenious. Evil genius? Customer-pleasing genius? The company you would most likely refer to a friend? Let’s take a look.

No More Predictions Please: What’s Your Range of Possibility for 2019 It’s time for new year’s predictions. But 2019 is too difficult a year to try to envision in comparison to the year that comes next. 2020 was the even year in our sights for the last 20 years. 2020…

Is the Sears bankruptcy the fault of financiers, looking at the world through spreadsheets? Don’t blame the spreadsheets. Logic is in the eye of the logician. There is a core belief that is shared among financiers and MBAs: companies have natural cycles of Startup, growth, maturity, and death. I was…

Typically, when companies get big, extremely mega big, $100 BN revenues big, they start to slow down. Google is not slowing down. Companies built on technology follow an S curve of growth. At the start of the curve, adoption is slow and development costs are high. At the inflection point…

Is there any room for business model diversification? Yesterday Facebook announced a re-org of their management team to improve communication and put more accountability for privacy decisions. But the company also needed a reorg to deal with the growing complexity of their business. Reason Street’s Facebook Timeline link here for closer view. We all thought we understood Facebook’s…

Swerving and pivoting a business model story for customer joy and massive shareholder value Thinking of a switch to a subscription model? We have much to learn from the swerves and pivots of today’s leading subscription company: Netflix. Of the top 5 tech companies, only Netflix depends entirely on a…