Today's massively scaling startups - which rapidly grow to millions of users and billions in valuation - do not sell a product or service. Instead, they build a platform on which others can create and exchange value.The many manifestations of the platform business model - social media, the peer economy, cryptocurrencies, APIs and developer ecosystems, the Internet of things, crowdsourcing models, and many others - are becoming increasingly relevant.Yet, most new platform ideas fail because the business design and growth strategies involved in building platforms are not well understood.Platform Scale lays out a structured approach to designing and growing a platform business model and addresses the key factors leading to the success and failure of these businesses.Six core concepts for successful platform business model design1. Re-imagine your business for platform scaleThe mechanism by which these new business models scale so rapidly. Understand the shift in thinking needed to manage businesses with platform scale and the impact of network effects, virality, behavior design and data."We are not in the business of building software. We are in the business of enabling interactions."2. Leverage interaction-first designHow detailed consideration around designing the producer-consumer core interaction is critical for building business models that leverage platform scale."The design of the platform business model involves the design of a core interaction followed by the design of an open infrastructure that will enable and govern this interaction."3. Build cumulative value and minimize interaction failureKnow the key managerial decisions to focus on while managing platform scale businesses, all geared towards maximizing the ability of these businesses to enable interactions by scaling producer participation and minimizing interaction failure."Platform scale is achieved by maximizing the repeatability and efficiency of the platform's core interaction."4. Solve chicken and egg problemsPlatform business models face an all too familiar catch-22 chicken and egg problem on the way to scaling. This can be overcome by designing the conditions for sparking interactions."The solution to the chicken-and-egg problem requires a bait that can break the vicious cycle of no activity."5. Design viral enginesUnderstand the drivers of viral growth in a world of networks and apply the viral canvas design-first approach to viral growth."Virality is a business design problem, not a marketing or engineering effort. It requires design before optimization."6. Account for reverse network effectsConsider the counter view on platform scale and be on the lookout for conditions where scale can be detrimental to platform businesses."The goal of platform scale is to ensure the simultaneous scaling of quantity and quality, of interactions."Platform Scale is a maker's guide for entrepreneurs, innovators and educators looking to understand and implement the inner workings of highly scalable platform business models.

    It:Incorporates the "Business Model Canvas" as the organizing principle for startup hypothesesProvides separate paths and advice for web/mobile products versus physical productsOffers a wealth of detailed instruction on how to get, keep, and grow customers recognizing the different techniques for web and physical channelsAnd teaches a "new math" for startups: "metrics that matter for fueling growth"The Startup Owner's Manual is a step-by-step, near-encyclopedic reference manual or "how to" for building a successful, scalable startup. Want to know what to do the first, week, month or year?What's the right distribution channel for your product?How to get traffic to your web site? …and how to activate customers or users on arrival?Who are the right "first customers," and why? …plus many more great tips in nearly 500 pages, complete with index, glossary, and Customer Development ChecklistsIt's the indispensible reference guide for any startup founder, entrepreneur, investor or educator.

    Scroll down to the present day and MySpace is one of the most visited Internet destinations in America, displaying more than 40 billion webpage views per month and generating nearly $1 billion annually for Rupert Murdoch’s online empire. Even by the standards of the Internet age, the MySpace saga is an astounding growth story, which climaxed with the site’s acquisition by Murdoch’s News Corporation in 2005 for a sum approaching one billion dollars. But more than that, it may be the defining drama of the digital era. In Stealing MySpace, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Julia Angwin chronicles the rise of this Internet powerhouse. With an unerring eye, Angwin details how MySpace took the Internet by storm by grabbing the best ideas from around the Web, encouraging pinup stars such as Tila Tequila to make their home on its pages and giving everyone freedom to experiment with online identities–including using somebody else’s identity. Stealing MySpace introduces us to the site’s founders, Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson, who dabbled in computer hacking, online pornography, spam, and spyware before starting MySpace. Although their street savvy, doggedness, and clubbing skills far eclipsed their tech prowess, they stumbled their way to success and soon found themselves at ground zero of a high-stakes war that pitted Rupert Murdoch against his frequent nemesis, the combative Viacom CEO Sumner Redstone. Angwin sheds light on the dizzying backroom deals that allowed Murdoch to snatch MySpace from Viacom’s grasp even as the MySpace founders remained in the dark about their own fate. Then she takes us inside the Murdoch empire as DeWolfe and Anderson lobby furiously to regain control of their creation. Venturing beyond the business aspects of the story, Angwin also explores the Internet culture, a voyeuristic world in which MySpace must stay one step ahead of amateur pornographers, sexual predators, and “spoofers” who set up fake profiles (Rupert Murdoch himself tolerates dozens of phony “Ruperts” on the site) and cope with the general excesses and sometimes illegal acts of a community of account holders equal in number to the population of Japan. In Stealing MySpace, Julia Angwin dishes on the epic real-world battle for control of a virtual empire. In a savvy, smart, fast-paced narrative reminiscent of Bryan Burrough and John Helyar’s Barbarians at the Gate and Michael Lewis’s The New New Thing, Stealing MySpace tells is the whole gripping story behind a breakout cultural phenomenon.

    Lauder, shares the business and life lessons he learned while turning the mom-and-pop company his mother founded into a multi-billion-dollar empire.In 1958, the Estée Lauder company sold only a few products under one brand in just a handful of prestigious department stores across the United States and had annual revenues of about $800,000. Today, the company is one of the world's leading manufacturers and marketers of prestige skin care, makeup, fragrance and hair care products, with annual sales more than $14 billion. It has more than 25 brands, and its products are sold in over 150 countries and territories. That’s due to Leonard A. Lauder, Estée Lauder's oldest son, who envisioned and effected this expansion during a remarkable 60-year tenure, including leading the company as CEO and Chairman.In this engrossing memoir, the leader now known as Estée Lauder’s “Chief Teaching Officer,” reflects on growing up with the company, from the struggles of the Great Depression and the heady decades of the post-World War II boom through the cutthroat rivalry with Revlon and L’Oréal and today’s global challenges. Lauder shares inside stories about the company and pays loving tribute to his mother, the eponymous founder, and offers keen insights on achieving success, learning from mistakes, and growing an international company in an age of economic turbulence, uncertainty, and fierce competition.

    The more knowledgable of them will add the likes of Microsoft, Ashton-Tate, Compaq, and Borland. But no one will say Xerox. Fifteen years after it invented personal computing, Xerox still means "copy." More than anything, Fumbling the Future is a tale of human beings whose talents, hopes, fears, habits, and prejudices determine the fate of our largest organizations and of our best ideas. In an era in which technological creativity and economic change are so critical to the competitiveness of the American economy, Fumbling the Future is a parable for our times.

    We Are the Nerds is a riveting look deep inside this captivating, maddening enterprise–whose army of highly engaged (obsessed?) users have been credited with everything from solving cold case crimes to seeding alt-right fury and helping to land Donald Trump in the White House. We Are the Nerds is a gripping start-up business narrative: the story of how Reddit’s founders, Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, rose up from their suburban childhoods to become millionaires and create an icon of the digital age–before seeing the site engulfed in controversies and nearly losing control of it for good. Based on Christine Lagorio’s exclusive access to founders Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman, We Are the Nerds is also a compelling exploration of the way we all communicate today–and how we got here. Reddit and its users have become a mirror of the Internet: it has dingy corners, shiny memes, malicious trolls, and a sometimes heart-melting ability to connect people across cultures, oceans, and ideological divides.

    In a 1995 interview, the late Steve Jobs claimed that the secret to his and Apple’s success was talent. “We’ve gone to exceptional lengths to hire the best people,” he said, believing that the talented resource was twenty-five times more valuable than an average alternative. For Microsoft founder Bill Gates, the multiple was even higher:A great lathe operator commands several times the wage of an average lathe operator, but a great writer of software code is worth 10,000 times the price of an average software writer.While the actual number might be up for debate, the importance of technical talent is not. The most successful companies today are those that understand the strategic role that developers will play in their success or failure. Not just successful technology companies – virtually every company today needs a developer strategy. There’s a reason that ESPN and Sears have rolled out API programs, that companies are being bought not for their products but their people. The reason is that developers are the most valuable resource in business.How did we get here? How did developers become the most important constituency in business seemingly overnight? The New Kingmakers explores the rise of the developer class, its implications and provides suggestions for navigating the new developer-centric landscape.

    In less than four months a group of eight retired executives orchestrated a stunning revolt within Morgan Stanley, the venerable and—until recently—most successful financial services firm on Wall Street. Now acclaimed journalist and historian Patricia Beard brings together the entire behind-the-scenes story in Blue Blood and Mutiny, a real-life business thriller exposing the tale that shook high finance.In March 2005 the business world woke up to an unprecedented full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal calling for the removal of Morgan Stanley's CEO. It was paid for by a cohort of eight former Morgan Stanley executives, including an ex-chairman and an ex-president, who soon would be dubbed the "Eight Grumpy Old Men." Their target was CEO Philip Purcell, a midwesterner who had come to power following Morgan Stanley's 1997 merger with Dean Witter Discover, where Purcell had been chief executive. In his eight years as CEO, Purcell had presided over a 50 percent decline in stock price since its peak in 2000 and a series of high-profile government and civil lawsuits that had tarnished the company's once-sterling reputation. Just a few months after the Journal ad, Purcell would retire under pressure, and former president John Mack, who had been pushed out by Purcell, was appointed CEO. The "Eight Grumpy Old Men" won the battle.The revolt of the Eight is about more than the stock price, or any bottom-line metrics: it signals a clash of cultures and a battle for the soul of American business. Since its founding, Morgan Stanley has been an elite enterprise guided by J. P. Morgan Jr.'s motto "A First Class Business in a First Class Way." The House of Morgan stood for something larger than success with honor; its ethos was unique—some would say sacred—and the eight retired executives believed this ideal had been undermined during Purcell's reign.Opening the long-closed doors of a bastion of Wall Street that has maintained the strictest privacy until now, Blue Blood and Mutiny weaves the history of Morgan Stanley with the inside story of the fight for dominance between two competing business cultures—one, the collegial meritocracy handed down from the days of J. P. Morgan, and the other, a cold, contemporary corporate model. Here is the season's must-read book for anyone who wants to understand the future of American business.

    While other nerds were fumbling with password possibilities, this adept break-artist was penetrating the digital secrets of Sun Microsystems, Digital Equipment Corporation, Nokia, Motorola, Pacific Bell, and other mammoth enterprises. His Ghost in the Wires memoir paints an action portrait of a plucky loner motivated by a passion for trickery, not material game. (P.S. Mitnick's capers have already been the subject of two books and a movie. This first-person account is the most comprehensive to date.)

    Drawing on Lopp's management experiences at Apple, Netscape, Symantec, and Borland, this book is full of stories based on companies in the Silicon Valley where people have been known to yell at each other. It is a place full of dysfunctional bright people who are in an incredible hurry to find the next big thing so they can strike it rich and then do it all over again. Among these people are managers, a strange breed of people who through a mystical organizational ritual have been given power over your future and your bank account.Whether you're an aspiring manager, a current manager, or just wondering what the heck a manager does all day, there is a story in this book that will speak to you.

    It's Tuesday morning and on his drive into the office, Bill gets a call from the CEO. The company's new IT initiative, code named Phoenix Project, is critical to the future of Parts Unlimited, but the project is massively over budget and very late. The CEO wants Bill to report directly to him and fix the mess in ninety days or else Bill's entire department will be outsourced. With the help of a prospective board member and his mysterious philosophy of The Three Ways, Bill starts to see that IT work has more in common with manufacturing plant work than he ever imagined. With the clock ticking, Bill must organize work flow streamline interdepartmental communications, and effectively serve the other business functions at Parts Unlimited. In a fast-paced and entertaining style, three luminaries of the DevOps movement deliver a story that anyone who works in IT will recognize. Readers will not only learn how to improve their own IT organizations, they'll never view IT the same way again.

    For the first time ever, Jordan Belfort opens his playbook and gives readers access to his exclusive step-by-step system the same system he used to create massive wealth for himself, his clients, and his sales teams. Until now this revolutionary program was only available through Jordan s $1,997 online training. Now in The Way of the Wolf, Belfort is ready to unleash the power of persuasion to a whole new generation of readers, revealing how anyone can bounce back from devastating setbacks, master the art of persuasion, and build wealth. Every technique, every strategy, and every tip has been tested and proven to work in real-life situations. Written in his own inimitable voice, The Way of the Wolf cracks the code on how to persuade anyone to do anything, and coaches readers, regardless of age, education, or skill level, to be a master sales person, negotiator, closer, entrepreneur, or speaker."

    Beyond the unquestioned genius and vision of Bill Gates, what accounts for Microsofts astounding success? Drawing on almost two years of on-site observation at Microsoft headquarters, eminent scientists Michael A. Cusumano and Richard W. Selby reveal many of Microsoft's innermost secrets. This inside report, based on forty in-depth interviews by authors who had access to confidential documents and project data, outlines the seven complementary strategies that characterize exactly how Microsoft competes and operates, including the "Brain Trust" of talented employees and exceptional management; "bang for the buck" competitive strategies and clear organizational goals that produce self-critiquing, learning, and improving; a flexible, incremental approach to product development; and a relentless pursuit of future markets. Cusumano and Selby's masterful analysis successfully uncovers the distinctive way in which Microsoft has combined all of the elements necessary to get to the top of an enormously important industry -- and stay there.

    Re-imagining military surplus as safari and expedition wear, the former journalist and artist created a world that captured the zeitgeist for a generation and spoke to the creativity, adventure, and independence in everyone. In a book that’s honest, funny, and charming, Mel and Patricia tell in alternating voices how they upended business conventions and survived on their wits and imagination. Many retail and fashion merchants still consider Banana Republic’s early heyday to be one of the most remarkable stories in fashion and business history. The couple detail how, as “professional amateurs,” they developed the wildly original merchandise and marketing innovations that broke all retail records and produced what has been acclaimed by industry professionals to be “the best catalogue of all time.” A love story wrapped in a business adventure, Wild Company is a soulful, inspiring tale for readers determined to create their own destiny with a passion for life and work and fun.

    Along the way, we encounter black holes, turtles, snakes, dragons, axe-sharpening, and yak-shaving—and take a guided tour through the theories and methods, both brilliant and misguided, that litter the history of software development, from the famous ‘mythical man-month’ to Extreme Programming. Not just for technophiles but for anyone captivated by the drama of invention, Dreaming in Code offers a window into both the information age and the workings of the human mind.