How Amazon's Leader Makes Decisions

In an excerpt on Fast Company from a new collection of his writings, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says that his leadership secret is making fewer, better decisions—and thinking three years out. "If I make … three good decisions a day," he writes, "that’s enough, and they should just be as high quality as I can make them."

2_CODE

Open Source’s Achilles Heel

When the open source concept emerged in the 1990s, it was conceived as a bold new form of communal labor: If you made your code open source, dozens or even hundreds of programmers would chip in to improve it; many hands would make light work. Here's the reality today, Wired reports: The open source movement runs on the heroic efforts of not enough people doing too much work.

3_STARTUPS

The Power of the Scientific Method

The Lean Startup method devised by serial entrepreneur and software engineer Eric Ries is about quick, iterative learning through experimentation and feedback, and quitting or pivoting when the original idea proves to be untenable. But can the lean method itself be made better? This Harvard Business Review article argues that training founders to think like scientists could help reduce the risk of sticking with ideas that don’t ultimately work out.

4_ENTREPRENEURS

The Bill Gates Speech Behind the Founding of Zoom

In 1994, Microsoft founder Bill Gates gave a speech about the internet's potential. Future Zoom founder Eric Yuan was in the audience. Yuan says the speech changed his life forever. Inc. magazine says his story is a lesson for every founder and would-be founder on when and how to take a big risk.

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5_MARKETING

How to Explain Agile Marketing to a CMO

While many marketing teams are all jazzed up about agile, CMOs may need a little more convincing. MarketingLand offers some tips, including 1) don't make it a process conversation weighed down by agile lingo, and 2) look for pain points.

6_MEDIA

Why BuzzFeed Acquired HuffPost

Jonah Peretti co-founded the Huffington Post, then left to start BuzzFeed. Now he’s running both companies: BuzzFeed has acquired HuffPost from Verizon. In a Recode podcast, Peretti explains his three-word rationale for the deal: scale, scale, scale.

7_APPS

How Private Is Your Pay App?

The pandemic has more people than ever using pay apps like Venmo and PayPal. But not all virtual peer-to-peer payment tools treat data privacy equally, The Markup reports.

8_DIGITAL MARKETING

What RankBrain Means for SEO

RankBrain is a core part of Google’s search algorithm. By leveraging machine learning, it helps Google understand a searcher’s intent and serve the most relevant content to them. Yet most marketers still haven’t adapted their SEO strategy to this transformation. To optimize for RankBrain, HubSpot says, several steps are necessary. The first one: Stop thinking of SEO in terms of keywords alone.

9_DESIGN

Contact Pages That Drive Engagement

A primary aim of any website is to drive conversions. What many business owners don’t realize is that a well-designed contact page is the gateway to deeper, more lucrative relationships with potential prospects, Web Designer Depot says.

10_SAY WHAT?

Cat App

An app that aims to translate your cat’s meow has been developed by a former Amazon Alexa engineer, the BBC reports. MeowTalk records the sound and then attempts to identify the meaning. One stumbling block: Research suggests that, unlike their human servants, cats do not share a language; each cat’s meow is unique and tailored to its owner. Currently, there are only 13 phrases in the app’s vocabulary including: “Feed me!”, “I’m angry!” and “Leave me alone!”