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Curator: Amazon Culture Shock, Work Wisdom, Vesting Schedules, Email Snooze

Here’s our weekly link roundup of small business buzz, musings and muchness. A curation of the best small business talk around the web.

Weekly Buzz: We scour the headlines so you don’t have to. Sit back, relax, and enjoy our curated reads. Here’s our weekly link roundup of small business buzz, musings and muchness. A curation of the best small business talk around the web.


 

Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace

At Amazon, workers are encouraged to tear apart one another’s ideas in meetings, toil long and late (emails arrive past midnight, followed by text messages asking why they were not answered), and held to standards that the company boasts are “unreasonably high.” The internal phone directory instructs colleagues on how to send secret feedback to one another’s bosses. Employees say it is frequently used to sabotage others. (NY Times)

 

7 Pieces of Wisdom That Will Change the Way You Work

Wisdom, in the words of Maria Popova, is knowledge that matters; it has both a practical and moral component to it that enriches our lives and inspires us to act wisely. Because the path to creativity is fraught with uncertainty, fear, and self-doubt, we naturally look to the wisdom of others to stop us from getting off course. (99U)

 

5 Ways To Create A Stylish And Unique Brand

I became a success coach after creating a popular healthy lifestyle blog in Australia, and on my blog, making everything beautiful had been part of my business model. That wasn’t particularly unique to my blog, although it certainly had my personal touch. I did what everyone else did within the blog world. Not so in the larger entrepreneurial world, as I soon found out. (YFS Magazine)

 

Small Business Credit Card Basics: 5 Ways to Get the Most Out of Your Card

Small-business credit cards offer numerous advantages over other financing options; rewards and cash back for spending, 0% interest on purchases, and sign-up bonuses are just a few. But to get the maximum value from your small-business credit card, you have to avoid the costly mistakes that can easily outweigh the card’s benefits. (Nerd Wallet)

 

Sales Compensation: Beware, You Get What You Ask For

Few things are more motivating for quality salespeople than giving qualified reps a seat at the decision-making table. Especially when they’ve only been exposed to the “coin-operated” salesperson mindset, where their role is highlighted when they hit their numbers but otherwise marginalized. Yet when it comes to incentivizing team members, there’s no single thing a founder could do that significantly correlates with success (r2 almost equals 1!) than a compensation plan done well. (Andreessen Horowitz)

 

Why Startups Are Growing Faster Today Than Ever Before

Startups today are growing faster than they have in the past. US VC backed startups in 1998 grew revenue 63% per year on average. In 2014, the median startup grew at 85% CAGR before going public. (TOMASZ TUNGUZ)

 

Face-to-Face Tops Social As WOM Vehicle

Both Millennials and Gen Xers say they’re more likely to spread the word about their favorite brands and products face-to-face than via social media, according to results from a CrowdTwist study. Beyond those two leading word-of-mouth vehicles, though, email proves more popular among Gen Xers while texting is more apt to be used by Millennials. (Marketing Charts)

 

Revisiting the Vesting Schedule

Silicon Valley gave birth to (among many other things) the practice of granting employees equity as part of their compensation package. This practice began nearly fifty years ago with the spawn of companies like Hewlett-Packard. However, the terms of earning your equity over time have remained largely unchanged. (EquityZen)

 

Email Marketers Move to Cross-Channel, Real-Time Communication

While syncing data between behaviors gleaned from digital channels and customer databases is important, these are not the only two data sources on the minds of email marketers. Increasingly, many also look to pull in offline purchase data, whether via in-store collection at the point of sale or from third-party sources. (eMarketer)

 

Attractive Entrepreneurs Get More Funding – But Only If They’re Male

If you’re an entrepreneur looking for funding it pays to be attractive – and male. The research paper Investors prefer entrepreneurial ventures pitched by attractive men, written by researchers at Harvard, Wharton School and MIT, found the gender and attractiveness of entrepreneurs have a significant effect on whether their business ventures will receive funding. (The Globe And Mail)

 

The Magic of Email Snooze

In a recent First Round Review article, former Google President of Enterprise Apps Dave Girouard voiced the importance of speed in making decisions. “Deciding on when a decision will be made from the start is a profound, powerful change that will speed everything up.” I believe this statement is broadly true, and no where else is it more tangible for me than in managing daily email. After all, what is responding to email other than a thousand decisions? (TOMASZ TUNGUZ)

 

Why Entrepreneurs Can’t Afford To Neglect Their Mental Health

The internet is packed with self-help articles about how to start your own business. But there’s a glaring hole amidst the many listicle reminders to be confident, determined, flexible, and, of course, open to taking risks. What’s too often left out of the conversation are the potential side effects of starting a new business: failure, humiliation, and the mental health problems those events may exacerbate. (The Week)

 

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