Lessons from the Tech Giants

1K Blog Marathon: Day 64

Yesterday I’m thinking of the ways to make a great company, in case I step into a gold and be a billionaire in a snap. Learning from others is a great way to evade the traps of the business world. Let’s take a look at the lessons that we can learn from the large tech companies.

Don’t be afraid to think bigger!

As many inspirational speakers say, when you think small, you can get small results. But when you think big, the universe will conspire to bring you that big dream you are always wanting to have!

It’s not a crime to aim for the biggest online library, like what Amazon does. From a small space in his office, Jeff Bezos created the largest multi-platform company in the world. If he didn’t think big, he wouldn’t make it from the dot com bubble. He didn’t want an online library for America, he dreamed of taking on globally.

And it’s not a crime to shoot for, well, the Mars – take it from SpaceX. Despite the odds, and few costly failures, he finally launched his own rocket! And what’s next is the Mars, for the filthy rich tourists!

It’s better to fail from a big dream rather than fail on a small one. When you think small, you are limiting your capacity to think of the ways how to achieve the greater goal. And that’s the reason why I aim for a thousand blog post!

Always solve the customer’s problems

You can never go wrong by providing solutions to your customer’s dilemmas. A product – software or physical, cannot go a long way if it does not solve the pain point of your customers.

When Larry Page and Sergey Brin created “BackRub” (predecessor of Google), they aim to solve the problem of analyzing websites to show the most relevant search items. What we learn from this is that we should understand our customers.

Successful tech companies are always connecting with their market. They use surveys to get to the heart of the problem. You cannot guess how a user interacts with your product, not unless you hear it from them “first hand”. So if any problem with your product arouses, your phone should be one call away. Hmm, did I solve any of your problems with my blog? Or I’m just giving another question to your mind?

Create you ideal Company Culture

Free food. Pet day. Bicycle lane, inside the office? Team dinner every month? Even playing Tekken 7 during lunch hours inside the office!

Company Culture is the values and behaviors shared by group of people inside a common organization. We can see it from the “no cubicle wall” of the workstations on Facebook, which shows the culture of “openness and transparency”.

Google, who popularized the company culture, have so many cultures – one great example is the “Energy Pod” (Oh how I love to try one). They also encourage creativity, you can sit on a couch while doing your job, provided that it will make you comfortable. So if you want to work in a place where you can express yourself, or do what you love – create a culture.

People First

Ok, our company may not be a tech giant (for now), but I will just take this time to be proud of our company! In terms of thinking the welfare of its employees, the boss didn’t hesitate to give and extend all things that they can do – from adjusting the office situations to cope with the increasing number of the team, to having a one-to-one zoom meeting just asking “how’s your day?” They make sure that everyone in the office is having fun while doing their jobs.

I think the takeaway with this is that if you take care of your employees, they will take care of the company for you. And as I told my boss after months of working for him, “I realized I’m not finding the right job, but I’m finding the right boss!”

Futuristic

It’s not that you have to be an oracle or prophet to foresee the future, but by utilizing data and trends, one can make a somewhat plausible predictions on the track your business is taking in.

Take Apple for example. They have the ability to capture their customers not only by solving their problems, but also by giving them new technologies that they didn’t know they need. Apple can see the inconvenience on their customer’s lives, but few are taking actions. For example is the App Store. Who thought of selling their own app and make programmers more profitable?

There are so many things that life teaches us. Also, there are great lessons that Tech Companies can teach us. But these are not one size fits all approach. As you go on your path, you may encounter things that may be the same or different from the examples above. Just do you best, follow excellence!

“And that’s one blog, stay hungry!”