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Business

• Never talk to potential acquirers of your company just for the sake of checking whether you'll receive an offer too good to refuse.
• When receiving offers from potential acquirers, expect a reasonable valuation. Should they ever be surprising, they'll always be surprisingly low.
• When you receive an offer for a potential acquisition, let the acquirer make the effort, which they will certainly do in case they're really serious.
• A good salesman is never the one to come up with a price first. Try to be the one reacting to the price, not the one proposing it.
• If you're in talks about selling your company and you must come up with a valuation, put it out confidently and high enough for bargaining.
• Get a good lawyer.
• Get a good accountant.
• As the buyer of a company, you'll usually prefer an asset sale, whereas as a seller, you'll probably want a stock sale.
• Sole proprietorships or partnerships cannot be sold as a stock sale, as there is no stock available.
• When selling a company, always keep your business running and growing until it's really not your job anymore.
• "A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works." (John Gall)
• Advertising is like the flu. If it's not constantly changing, people develop immunity.
• "Sizing the market for a disruptor based on an incumbent's market is like sizing the car industry off how many horses there were in 1910." (Aaron Levie)
• Don't compare your company to a family -- it's not a lifetime relationship and layoffs are part of the game. You shouldn't (and can't) trust in loyalty blindly.
• Consider your company a professional sports teams: You have a mission and come together with other people to accomplish that mission. The composition of your team changes over time, but your solidarity is based on trust and mutual investment, which results in mutual benefit. All of you have to prioritize team success over individual glory and yet this is the best way to achieve individual success as well. You are going to bring together a disparate team and achieve a common goal -- despite the reality of personnel turnover. That's what all businesses should strive for. (Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha, Chris Yeh)
• The main driver of inequality is returns on capital that exceed the rate of economic growth. (Thomas Piketty)
• "Design depends largely on constraints. [O]ne of the few effective keys to the design problem [is] the ability of the designer to recognize as many of the constraints as possible — his willingness and enthusiasm for working within these constraints." (Charles Eames)
• Project management triangle: Fast, cheap, and reliable — choose two. That's all you can get.
• Incentivizing the right behaviors is incredibly important. Rewarding managers with bonuses if their features are part of a final product, for example, can lead to feature bloat. Don't do that.
• "[W]hile manipulating people with incentives seems to work in the short run, it is a strategy that ultimately fails and even does lasting harm. [We should] question our reliance on a theory of motivation derived from laboratory animals." (Alfie Kohn)
• "[T]he more we use artificial inducements to motivate people, the more they lose interest in what we're bribing them to do." (Alfie Kohn)
• "Start with focusing on a small market and dominate that market first." (Peter Thiel)
• "If you don't want to split shares evenly then perhaps you should not be co-founders." (Peter Thiel)
• "I am [...] a fan of the two-person founding team, with one more on the business side and one more on the technical side." (Peter Thiel)
• "We know well [Alibaba hasn't] survived because our strategies are farsighted and brilliant, or because our execution is perfect, but because for 15 years we have persevered in our mission of 'making it easier to do business across the world', because we have insisted on a 'customer first' value system, because we have persisted in believing in the future, and because we have insisted that normal people can do extraordinary things." (Jack Ma)
• The only way to fight knowledge-hiding in the workplace? "Put in incentives to reward people on team outcomes versus solely on individual outcomes." (David Zweig)
• "First-time founders care most about their exit. Every time after that, you focus on legacy." (Unknown)
• "Culture eats strategy for breakfast." (Peter Drucker)
• "Saying yes is so much easier than saying no, but nobody else will ever value your time as much as you do so you need to be a responsible steward of it." (Andrew Bosworth)
• "Look back on your past week and assemble an honest accounting of your attention. Does the time you spent in each area mirror the importance of that area? This exercise is the true test of your ability to prioritize. It will tell you whether you are able to maintain focus on the important or whether you get distracted by the urgent." (Andrew Bosworth)
• In 2014, social media (e.g. Facebook, Twitter) had already become a mature market with little innovation. Private messaging (e.g. WhatsApp, Snapchat) was the new social media.
• The "sharing economy" turned out to be the "rental economy", actually.
• "If you don't have first hand experience of an industry, you're probably wrong about how it works, what problems they have and so how they should be solved. Talk to people." (Ben Dixon)
• "Trying to raise money and apply to accelerators is a full time job. You're probably either building [a product] or fund raising. Not both. If in doubt, choose building." (Ben Dixon)
• Providing free returns to customers in e-commerce has proved profitable. Customers who make use of a free return are far more likely to buy again in the same shop the next time. This easily compensates for the costs of the free return.
• "[P]art of the problem with freemium is that it changes your perception of where the value lies. The user discounts the value of the free component to nothing and only measures the value of the additional functionality that is unlocked with buying the premium portion. A lot of the time, this looks like a ripoff." (scriptman)
• It's easier to lower the price when you don't sell enough than to raise the price on something that is selling well.
• "[A]s far as equity is concerned, it's worth $0 until you exit. There's a potential for millions, but my lottery ticket is also worth potentially millions of dollars. My landlord won't accept my lottery ticket as payment." (Jemaclus)
• "So one way to insider trade is, you work at a bank, and you advise on mergers, and before a merger happens you meet a guy and write the name of the target on a napkin, and the guy reads the napkin, and then he eats it, and then he buys stock in the target, and he makes money, and then you meet in a parking lot and he hands you a bag of cash representing your cut of his profits. There are a lot of variations, many involving golf, but that's the basic structure." (Matt Levine)
• "I swear to you, sitting a throne is a thousand times harder than winning one." (George R. R. Martin)

Salary negotiation

In job interviews and negotiations, you'll usually get asked about your current salary and your desired salary, often very early in the process. For that situation, Patrick McKenzie and Josh Doody recommend the following:

• Show confidence, professionalism and competence in your response to the salary question.
• Do not lie in response to the salary question. Do not invent any high salary. Be honest and only withhold information.
• Perhaps suggest to get back to the salary question later on, after you've both made sure you're a good fit for each other. If you're the right fit, you'll probably be able to agree on the numbers regarding salary, vacation days and so on. Otherwise, you don't need to worry about the numbers, anyway. They are irrelevant.
• The later in the process you talk about the salary, the better. They will offer and accept higher salaries after learning about your skill level, as opposed to the time before. Otherwise, you might not even get a chance anymore to demonstrate your strengths.
• If you actually give a number as a response to the salary question, this will immediately cap your range for the negotiation. That means you'll lose out on any higher salary that they might have been willing to offer. So don't do this. Never give a number first.
• You might answer that you're not comfortable sharing the requested information and that you'd rather want to focus on the value you might add to the company.
• If they say they need a number in order to move the process forward, they're just lying to you in order to compromise your negotiating position.
• Saying that you want to make a (big) step forward both in terms of responsibility and compensation signals that you're willing to perform (even) better than before and accomplish more, but also want proportionately better compensation.
• Illustrate that only they know how they value your skills, how much they pay other people at their company, what their company's needs are, and how much value you'll be adding to their company. So they should suggest a base for the negotiations.
• Explain that they might give you a number and you'll happily tell them whether this is in your accepted range or not.
• Say that you trust them to give you a fair offer that is consistent with their standard practices and general compensation in the industry.
• Continue to block requests for a specific number or range, even if they keep pressing you on that number.
• Prior to the negotiation, you should have thought about your minimum acceptable salary. Now, do not accept any offer below that number.
• After receiving your first offer from the company, no matter what number it is, you're going to negotiate upwards. It's unlikely they have just given you their absolute maximum initially. You always, as a matter of policy, negotiate all offers.
• Negotiate all the single components of the compensation (e.g. also the vacation days) to get the best possible outcome.
• If they decline to negotiate a single component, you might ask where they suggest there is any flexibility, given that there doesn't seem to be any flexibility on that one component.
• As soon as you have a formal offer, ask for one or two days to think about it.