Breakpoint Book

The Future of Facebook and the Internet | Interview with Jeff Stibel

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Breakpoint author Jeff Stibel speaks with Rick Van Cise of KOMO radio about the how the world’s largest social network, Facebook, can take proactive measures to reach equilibrium after its breakpoint instead of following the likes of Friendster and Myspace into obscurity.

Furthermore, he notes that though the internet is not going anywhere, how we access and use it will. Our relationship with the internet has already begun to change, thanks largely to the popularity of apps, and will only continue to as technology progresses.

For reference, How Facebook Can Avoid a Slow, Painful Death is the Wired article mentioned during the interview.

When Teams Prevent Greatness – By Jeff Stibel

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Our society reveres individual greatness. We root for the Kobe Bryants and Peyton Mannings of the world, we are mesmerized by the likes of Meryl Streep and Steven Spielberg, we follow every move made by Warren Buffet and Elon Musk. Individuals have a special place in our world, and we attribute much of society’s success to unique people—Einstein, Newton, Da Vinci, Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr.—instead of the teams and movements behind them. It goes without saying that there is often an army of people that drive an individual to success. But individuals, acting alone, can do extraordinary things.

Read the whole article where it originally appeared.

This Is The Best Way To Process Failure

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After you fail, sometimes it helps to read the writing on the wall.
That’s what Jeff Stibel, chairman and CEO of Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corporation — a California company not affiliated with the more famous Dun & Bradstreet on the East Coast — came to realize.

About two years ago, Stibel and his assistant snuck into the office at night and created what they called a Failure Wall. The point was to…Read the full article on Business Insider where it originally appeared.

Two Years of Failure – by Jeff Stibel

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A little over two years ago, my assistant and I snuck into the office after hours and painted quotes of famous people’s thoughts about failure, from Winston Churchill (“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm”) to Sofia Loren (“Mistakes are part of the dues one pays for a full life”). After my assistant left, I took a Sharpie marker and wrote some of my most humbling failures on the wall.

The wall was met with a mixture of excitement and apprehension, both by employees and by the press who quickly caught wind of it. Over time, employees, partners, even family members came by to add their remarks until the wall was littered with failures. It was received favorably by…

Read the full article where it originally appeared on LinkedIn.

The boom in the money hunt for start-up capital, by Jeff Stibel – Excerpt from CNBC

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Entrepreneurs, by definition, are passionate about the new product or service that they’re working to bring to market. Nothing is more threatening to that passion than the realities of financing a business. And the truth is, financing is both the No. 1 thing entrepreneurs worry about and the last thing they should be worrying about. Their main focus should be growing their business and providing the best possible product. Of course, capital is a necessary evil.

In conjunction with Pepperdine University, my company just released the Pepperdine Private Capital Access Index, Fourth Quarter 2013 study, which showed that there has been a 5 percent rise…

Read the whole article on CNBC where it originally appeared.

The World’s Report Card: Is B The New A? – by Jeff Stibel

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On Friday we found out that Standard & Poor’s downgraded France’s credit rating. “Debt grade cut from AA+ to AA due to weak economic growth, high unemployment and government spending constraints,” the Telegraph reported. These issues are all too familiar to American readers, many of whom still recall the sting of having our own credit rating downgraded from AAA to AA+.

While the United States has always fancied itself in a league above any individual European country, this news should serve as a reminder that we’re not doing so badly on a relative basis. In fact, compared to the rest of the world’s economies, the United States ranks…

Read the full article on LinkedIn where it originally appeared.

How Credit-Worthy Is America, Inc.? – Excerpt from Harvard Business Review

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Last month, the government was partially shut down for 16 days at a cost of $24 billion and we came within two days of running out of money to meet our debt obligations. The current government funding will run out in January. The American people and the wider world are skeptical that the US will be able to get its fiscal house in order.

But setting aside political brinkmanship, can we objectively analyze how the country is doing financially? Rather than looking at debt figures or dollars spent in a vacuum, we need to also judge the US economy on a relative basis. After all, businesses sit in markets, which means…

Read the full article on Hbr.org where it originally appeared.

Free iPhones Would Yield Rich Returns – by Jeff Stibel

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Excerpt from LinkedIn:

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Last month, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced the long-anticipated iPhone 5S, and also a second product, the iPhone 5C, with a suggested retail price starting at $99. While Cook later argued that the 5C was not intended to be an entry-level device, it is clear that the less expensive device—Wal-Mart is currently selling it for $49—could enable less affluent customers to join the Apple family.

Basic economics strongly support this reasoning: demand for a product or service goes up as the price goes down. Keep prices low; encourage high demand. But oftentimes, lower prices have a paradoxical effect. In fact, lower cost is often equated with cheap, and nothing could be worse for Apple than having that association. It is one of the reasons that Steve Jobs always priced his products higher than others, even at the risk of losing market share.

The alternative to reducing prices is to eliminate them entirely. For many products and services, it’s not acceptable for the price to be low: it must be free. Apple may have been better served by giving the iPhone 5c away for free.

Read the whole article on LinkedIn, where it originally appeared.

(Photo Credit: wicker_man, Flickr)

 

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