A Quote by Ross Levinsohn
There are a lot of good ideas that could benefit from big media. You have a lot of companies that hit a wall and can't get beyond a certain level. They need the infrastructure and distribution of a large company.
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I think a lot of hedge funds get their trades from Wall Street and get their ideas from Wall Street. And I just like to find my own ideas. I'm reading a lot; I read a lot of news. I'm addicted to it. I basically - I follow my nose on news stories.
Fossil fuels are - they're inherently centralized. And you need a lot of infrastructure to get them out, and you need a lot of infrastructure to transport it, as Obama was explaining in front of all that pipe, right? Whereas renewable energy is everywhere.
I think a lot of funds get their ideas from Wall Street. I just like to find my own ideas. I read a lot. A lot of news. I just follow my nose. A lot of times it's a dead end, but sometimes there's value there.
You need to ask yourself, ‘Where do you want to work: startups, mid-size or large companies?’ If you find yourself debating the ‘startup versus large company’ choice you’ve already chosen the big company. Entrepreneurship isn’t a career choice it’s a passion and obsession.
Being a public company is really terrible for most companies. I'd say Facebook and Google have done a pretty good job of standing up to the incredible quarterly pressure to hit numbers, but most companies - and I've observed a lot now - don't do a very good job of that.
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.
This is one way that wealthy Americans could really contribute. They could put hundreds of millions of dollars into the infrastructure bank, be a good investment for them, for their children, for their grandchildren, and they would directly contribute to revitalizing a big sector of middle-class wages in America and making our country more productive, so that we could create more opportunity. But I think that we could get a lot of grassroots support from, like, local chambers of commerce and other things if they understood exactly how this infrastructure bank would work.
Large companies and government agencies have a lot to protect and therefore are not willing to take big risks. A large company taking a risk can threaten its stock price. A government agency taking a risk can threaten congressional investigation.
I think Wall Street is very important, especially to tech companies. Wall Street will get in their rhythm and go fund tech companies, and tech companies will go create jobs and employ a lot of people, so there's that aspect of Wall Street.
It's no secret that big institutional investors have a lot of advantages on Wall Street. They get the first chance to buy hot initial public offerings. They get to meet in person with companies' managements.
Coal companies have a lot of power in the media, and unfortunately a lot of information doesn't get out.
There are companies that are good at improving what they're already doing. There are companies that are good at extending what they're doing. And finally there are companies that are good at innovation. Every large company has to be able to do all three - improve, extend, and innovate - simultaneously.
Booksellers are tied to publishing - they need conventional publishing models to continue - but for those companies, that's not the case. Amazon is an infrastructure company; Apple sells hardware; Google is really an advertising company. You can't afford as a publisher to have those companies control your route to market.
It's not that you don't want to earn as much money as you can - it is your obligation, of course - but companies have obligations beyond that and they certainly have obligations beyond that at certain times, in the times in which they operate. And they also certainly ought to know that meeting and beating expectations is probably yesterday's game and it will be increasingly so, which would be by the way very healthy for companies. Running a company that meets and beats expectations, and that runs their company accordingly, are companies that I would question why anyone would invest in.
Most companies aim to get bigger. But beyond a certain point, bigness becomes synonymous with badness. Think of Big Pharma, Big Auto, Big Oil. Worse, if you are regularly described as one of the Big Four, Five, or Six in any business sector, you are probably already in the sights of regulators and lawmakers.
On the Internet, companies are scale businesses, characterized by high fixed costs and relatively low variable costs. You can be two sizes: You can be big, or you can be small. It's very hard to be medium. A lot of medium-sized companies had the financing rug pulled out from under them before they could get big.
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