business

"Technology has flattened the field - logistics, payments, backend operations - all are easier now. But if you don’t use tech to understand your consumer better,you will burn cash blindly"

"Enduring brands will be profitable. It’s not optional. But you need clarity on when and how you will get there and investors aligned with that journey"

"Looking at the last three decades in the field, I would be most satisfied if there were 100 or 1,000 of us in this tribe."

"If you're building a platform like Zepto or Blinkit, you’re in the Formula One lane. You need capital at scale, network effects, and speed. You will get diluted You’ll own less than 10% of your company and that’s okay, if that’s the game you signed up for"

"It's not expert-driven influence anymore. It’s user-generated, community-led. You need to meet them where they are with authenticity."

"Gen Z isn’t disloyal. They’re identity-driven. Whether it’s sustainability, ingredient sourcing or personalization they buy what aligns with their values"

"Building products has become easier and cheaper, but building brands is harder than ever"

"My family environment was supportive; in hindsight, that was very important. You need to encourage women in your life to try things out, she said, adding that one must do the hard work alone but a support system makes all the difference. Instead of asking women ‘why?’ loved ones need to ask them ‘why not"

"Somehow, we have come to equate profitability with a lack of ambition. That’s wrong"

"Women’s relationship with money will have to be fixed. Someone could be a high performer but opportunities pass by because of money - be it their own compensation or fixing a budget"

"We’ve all been stereotyped. But we face it with humour and a thick skin. You cannot let it affect your focus"

"Progress has to happen. There's more of us; we have a voice. We need to do better. Stand up for yourself"

"You can test your idea with very little capital. Bootstrap first. Validate your model. Don’t dilute before you’re ready"

"The first phase of ROI is understanding if your unit metrics justify growth. Without that, there is no longer game"

"There is no short game for a venture capitalist"

"Somehow, we have come to equate profitability with a lack of ambition"

"Having to hustle switches on the entrepreneurial mindset"

"The entrepreneurial mindset is not an abstract mindset change"

"It's actually none of that," said Sahar. "Entrepreneurs are no different than the rest of us, and I'm living proof of that"

"And yet, somehow, I've tapped into that entrepreneurial energy," she said. "Somehow, I've found it within me"

"That was the first flame of entrepreneurship in me"

"I loved the idea of starting my morning here"

"We made our own coffee cups because no company knew how to make American-style coffee cups, no bakery knew how to make muffins"

"I simply got an all-day tube pass for the circle line, and got off at every stop to see what they offered. It was disgusting filter coffee in polystyrene cups, and people were drinking it"

"I couldn’t understand why no one was having fun at work… I refused to accept that, these were meant to be the best years of my life"

"I nearly died OD-ing on 26 espressos during a coffee tasting course – no one told us we had to spit them out, so Bobby and I just drank them all"

"When you take the leap, something really powerful happens," Sahar said. "Your self-belief grows."

"All I had was a personal problem. I wanted a skinny latte every morning"

"Somehow, everything we didn't have clicked something on in my brain," Sahar said. "It made me problem solve the same way we problem solve outside—in a human way"

"It's never too early for this, and it's certainly never too late"

"Never let your ignorance stop you. You can teach yourself, and then you have the asset of a fresh perspective"

"I started. I got the flow going"

"A startup mindset is actually our only insurance policy in choppy waters"

"My motto in life is, 'leap and the net will appear"

"One of my BIGGEST LEARNINGS across the years is that life isn’t just about MAKING MONEY – no one is a COIN MACHINE at their core"

"DISCOVERY is one of life’s GREAT JOYS and COMPARISON is a total WASTE OF TIME"

"I was hit by a wave of freshly made coffee in the morning…I remember going to the bar and being asked ‘Soy cappuccino, latte, espresso?’ I fell in love with it"

"I was just like ‘Hang on Bobby, you’ve got me completely wrong, why doesn’t someone ELSE open a coffee bar for me to go to it? I didn’t see why I had to provide a solution to my own problem"

"This book is to be published under the aegis of a commercial publisher, which means that royalties are involved. But since scientific books generally have a limited audience, a royalty income is minuscule, but young and naive authors have visions of a Mercedes-Benz in the royalty picture. Factually, my last royalty check on a book produced a few years back was forty-six cents! I did not cash it and the publisher wrote me, "Why don't you cash your royalty check." I said it would cost them a dollar to cash that check for forty-six cents but they insisted I do so to meet legal requirements and also to facilitate their bookkeeping!"

"You and I know very well that in nine cases out of ten the author is at a disadvantage because the publisher has capital and the author has not. We know perfectly well that in nine cases out of ten money is advanced by the publisher before the book is producible—often long before. No young or unsuccessful author (unless he were an amateur or an independent gentleman) would make a bargain for having that royalty, to-morrow, if he could have a certain sum of money, or an advance of money. The author who could command that bargain, could command it to-morrow, or command anything else. For the less fortunate or the less able, I make bold to say—with some knowledge of the subject, as a writer who made a publisher's fortune long before he began to share in the real profits of his books—that if the publishers met next week, and resolved henceforth to make this royalty bargain and no other. it would be an enormous hardship and misfortune because the authors could not live while they wrote."

"An app with the basic functionality of UberX can be duplicated and improved upon by independent developers who are working in tandem with cooperatives... Why bother handing over the revenue to Uber, the middleman? Lyft and Uber have serious issues with attrition; the pay rates for drivers can (and have been) lowered from one moment to the next, workplace surveillance is constant, and drivers can be “de– activated” (fired) at any time for digressions as small as criticizing the Uber mothership on Twitter...Worker-owned cooperatives can offer an alternative model of social organization to address financial instability. They will need to be: -collectively owned, -democratically controlled businesses, -with a mission to anchor jobs, -offer health insurance and pension funds and, -a degree of dignity."

"There isn’t just one, inevitable future of work. Let us apply the power of our technological imagination to practice forms of cooperation and collaboration. Worker–owned cooperatives could design their own apps-based platforms, fostering truly peer-to-peer ways of providing services and things, and speak truth to the new platform capitalists.. Companies like Uber and airbnb are enjoying their Andy Warhol moment, their $15 billion of fame, in the absence of any physical infrastructure of their own. They didn’t build that— they are running on your car, apartment, labor, and importantly, time. Think Outside the Boss. Instead of counting down to next month’s apocalypse, let’s make the idea of worker-owned cooperatives using ride ordering apps more plausible... Is real social change only thinkable if you have Big Money on your side? ...The inability to imagine a different life is capital’s ultimate triumph. Teachout recently proposed that one of the pathologies of the current system is that it trains people to be followers. I might add that it trains people to think of themselves as workers instead of collective owners..."

"Publix Super Markets, which operates in the Southeast, and W.L. Gore, the maker of Gore-Tex, are owned by employee stock ownership plans. America still harbors small worker cooperatives owned and operated by their employees, such as the Cheese Board Collective in my hometown Berkeley, Calif. But since the 1980s, profit-sharing has almost disappeared from large corporations. That’s largely because of a change in the American corporation that began with a wave of hostile takeovers and corporate restructurings in the 1980s. Raiders like Carl Icahn, Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken targeted companies they thought could deliver higher returns if their costs were cut. Since payrolls were the highest cost, raiders set about firing workers, cutting pay, automating as many jobs as possible, fighting unions, moving jobs to states with lower labor costs and outsourcing jobs abroad. To prevent being taken over, C.E.O.s began doing the same. This marked the end of most profit-sharing with workers."

"It’s no wonder, then, that Uber drivers in LA, San Francisco, Seattle, New York, and elsewhere have protested... upset about their industry being disrupted (a term the tech world loves) by a company offering low wages, stripping away worker protections, and bypassing regulations – all while stuffing the wallets of Silicon Valley executives.... As sharing activist Mira Luna puts it, “If greed was a major characteristic of the dying economy, sharing is a key element of the blueprint or DNA for the new economy.”...people should be able to use a service like AirBnB or Uber. But they should also own them cooperatively. A cooperative is a business or organization that is democratically owned and governed by its membership. This membership can be comprised of workers, consumers, producers, and a combination thereof... Cooperatives exist all around world, as well as in almost every sector. In the bad times, members of cooperatives collectively share the burden. In the good times, members of cooperatives collectively share the benefits. They also democratically govern the organization – one member, one share, one vote. In short, cooperatives are means to voluntarily redistribute the wealth amongst the laborers and the producers... Already, cooperatives are breaking into the domain of the sharing economy – in theory and in practice – and many of the people leading the charge are those dissatisfied with what both the traditional economy and the sharing economy had to offer them."

"Publix Super Markets, which operates in the Southeast, and W.L. Gore, the maker of Gore-Tex, are owned by employee stock ownership plans. America still harbors small worker cooperatives owned and operated by their employees, such as the Cheese Board Collective in my hometown Berkeley, Calif. But since the 1980s, profit-sharing has almost disappeared from large corporations. That’s largely because of a change in the American corporation that began with a wave of hostile takeovers and corporate restructurings in the 1980s. Raiders like Carl Icahn, Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken targeted companies they thought could deliver higher returns if their costs were cut. Since payrolls were the highest cost, raiders set about firing workers, cutting pay, automating as many jobs as possible, fighting unions, moving jobs to states with lower labor costs and outsourcing jobs abroad. To prevent being taken over, C.E.O.s began doing the same. This marked the end of most profit-sharing with workers."

"Jeff Bezos, who now owns 11.1 percent of Amazon’s shares of stock, is worth $165 billion overall. Other top Amazon executives hold hundreds of millions of dollars of Amazon shares. But most of Amazon’s employees, including warehouse workers, don’t share in the same bounty. If Amazon’s 840,000 employees owned the same proportion of their employer’s stock as Sears workers did in the 1950s—a quarter of the company—each would now own shares worth an average of about $386,904. There are many ways to encourage profit-sharing. During this pandemic, for example, Congress should prohibit the Treasury or the Federal Reserve from bailing out any corporation that doesn’t share its profits with its employees. It’s impossible to predict what kind of America will emerge from the crises we’re now experiencing, but the four-decade trend toward higher profits and lower wages is unsustainable, economically and politically. Sharing the profits with all workers is a logical and necessary first step to making capitalism work for the many, not the few."

"Our employees are the reason for our success and creating the ESOP will recognize and reward them for their efforts going forward... Being employee-owned allows us to preserve our culture for many years in the future, and provides us a way to move forward seamlessly and achieve our goals, while preserving the service our customers have come to expect... Recent research has shown companies who are ESOPs are typically faster, more productive, growing more, and more profitable with less turnover,” Mike Hedge shared. “These are all important to us as we enter into a new phase in the life of our organization. This will help in recruiting, retaining, and engaging employees as we move forward — I’m very pleased to announce Birkey’s is going into this new year 100 percent employee-owned."

"There is nothing more sacred in the auditor-client literature than the notion of auditor independence, dating from the emergence of a professionalized service in the 19th century. According to the self-congratulatory atmosphere among the regulators of the world's securities markets, the problem of dubious accounting would be fully solved by strictly limiting the kinds of services that auditors can provide to clients. Yet with each of the surviving Big Four burdened by the weight of a litigation list of cases large enough to be fatal, this unexamined burden has become yet another millstone. To be both blunt and unconventional — it is time to stop making nice, and to discard this 165-year-old piece of conventional wisdom. The concept of auditor independence does not serve the interests of investors."

"Clearly the attitude of disrespect that many executives have today for accurate reporting is a business disgrace. And auditors, as we have already suggested, have done little on the positive side. Though auditors should regard the investing public as their client, they tend to kowtow instead to the managers who choose them and dole out their pay. (“Whose bread I eat, his song I sing.”)"

"One of the biggest problems facing regulatory compliance is individuals running testing applications without understanding all the other simultaneous objectives still required. Running software will never make a person a competent auditor."