Transcript
Introduction
"The professor asked with a wide grin, 'So you want to write a book on high-tech CEOs? Well, gentlemen, it's a long shot, a huge long shot. And besides, no CEO knows why he's successful. It's all just luck.' Coming from a well-known strategic management professor, a comment such as this seems somewhat ridiculous. For if successful management were all luck, then why are we taking his class? Why, for that matter, were we in business school at all? Surely successful management was not entirely due to luck. There had to be some successful strategy and ideas at play, too.
Louis Pasteur once said that, 'Chance favors the prepared mind.' If chance is a major factor in a company's success, as our professor believed, then we really wanted to know what successful entrepreneurs do to prepare their minds. What are the crucial skills needed to run a successful company, to hire great people, to ship a great product? What skills should a potential manager try to develop? Why was one manager successful where another wasn't? Answers to these questions in the words of the very people who have started successful technology companies comprise this book.
We chose to focus on the computer industry for two reasons. First and foremost, computers are dynamically changing the way people exist. They are causing generational change. Compared to our parents who use computers for Word processing or technical applications at best, many of us use the power of computers for surfing the Internet, communicating with friends and colleagues, and balancing a checkbook. Second, going to Stanford's business school put us in the heart of Silicon Valley. Steve Jobs candidly told us one night, 'Well, if you're at heaven's gate, you might as well walk inside and take a peek.'"
That is an excerpt from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is In the Company of Giants: Candid Conversations with the Visionaries of the Digital World. And it was written by Rama Dev Jager and Rafael Ortiz. So just a few things before we jump back into the rest of the book, I just want to tell you how the book is structured. So it's a series of interviews by two Stanford MBA students with 16 technology founders. And in each interview, they give the philosophy -- their philosophy on company building, managing, developing new technology and then advice to people, to future entrepreneurs.