Reading Notes: What It Takes by Stephen Schwarzman

I visited Guangzhou over a holiday weekend and finished this book during the trip.

It is worth reading. It resembles a memoir but also explores the protagonist’s thoughts and lessons from different experiences. The account is fairly objective, and readers should find something valuable. Here are some excerpts and passages I particularly liked:

In 1978, Schwarzman led the Tropicana merger despite never having participated in a similar transaction. He was not entirely confident of the outcome, but with help from various resources, the deal succeeded and he became a partner at Lehman Brothers.

The opportunity arose by chance, and Schwarzman could have declined unfamiliar work. But doesn’t growth always involve leaving our comfort zones? Everyone encounters many such opportunities, yet those who seize them share openness and courage. Sometimes courage is all that is missing: once outside our comfort zones, we forget our fear and immerse ourselves in exploring the unknown. What remains is to develop our abilities in that environment.

Competition, opportunity, value. The harder the problem and the fewer available solutions, the more valuable your advice becomes. Solving problems everyone else avoids offers the least competition and the greatest opportunity.

In the abstract, everyone would probably agree with this 200 percent. It reminds me of a former company where we built a behavioral-data SaaS product. We often discussed integrating customers’ business data to close the loop between behavioral and business analysis. Implementation exposed many obstacles: customers did not trust third parties to host business data, formats differed, and integration with external platforms was difficult. We made many attempts, but none went anywhere. Two years ago, I thought we should perfect behavioral-data analysis and let customers optionally import business data, rather than actively integrating it ourselves.

I now think differently. Behavioral analysis alone is too narrow, and customers care much more about outcome data, or business data, than behavioral data. Few third-party platforms integrate both perfectly in one product, even though this is precisely a case where 1+1 > 2. Today, I might choose that area of least competition and greatest opportunity.

Entrepreneurship, success and failure, timing. Whether a startup succeeds often depends on timing. Start too early and customers are not ready; start too late and there are too many competitors.

Judging this is a mystery… Smart hardware was fashionable in 2012 and 2013, then the mobile-internet wave overshadowed it and many companies died. Now the Internet of Everything is gaining traction, and Xiaomi seems to be the only one that survived those lean years well. And SaaS companies call every year the first year of SaaS…

Write or call people you admire and ask for advice or a chance to meet. You never know who will agree. You will learn important things from them and build relationships that can last a lifetime. People you meet early in life can form extraordinary emotional bonds with you.

Something for us all to keep in mind.

Doing big things is just as difficult as doing small things. Choose a worthy, ambitious goal so the reward matches your effort.