Tag: bill gross

TED talk notes: Bill Gross on the #1 reason why startups succeed, and Leslie Chang on China’s factory workers

Every week, I share my notes from great TED talks. Here’s the complete list (it takes awhile to load).

Here are brief notes from talks by Bill Gross (Idealab founder) and Leslie Chang (author).

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Leslie T. Chang: The voices of China’s workers

  • spent 2 years in Dongguan studying female Chinese factory workers
  • motivation: better lives, help their family, curiosity, see the world
  • they didn’t care that much about their own living conditions or creature comforts, but wanted upward mobility
  • there’s decent upward mobility, some of these factory workers can become urban middle class (although she didn’t share #s in the talk)
  • what they wanted most: education; for example on weekends they’d take computer skills and English language classes

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Bill Gross: the single biggest reason why startups succeed

  • most important qualities (ranked)
    1. timing
    2. team execution
    3. idea (he thought this would be #1, but it wasn’t)
    4. business model
    5. funding
  • cites the following as examples of great timing: AirBnb (timing: there was a recession, people needed to earn and save money), Citysearch, Uber

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Here’s the full list of TED notes!