THB #357: Netflix & BuzzFeed & Tesla, Oh My!!!
Who was it that said, “Getting old ain’t for disrupters”?
I guess that’s no one (aka me).
It’s been an interesting week for some of the leading disrupters of the last decade.
Congratulations, yet again, to all of these companies for breaking new ground - a.k.a. disrupting - and becoming early powerful leaders in their adapted niches in each of their industries.
It is churlish to suggests that great success is in anyway easy. The success of these three companies has not been easy. The genius that these companies have been painted with in their success is quite reasonable, really. Big wins.
But if there is a lesson that I have learned over many, many, many, many years of dealing with successful people it is that they don’t always have a second act that works as well as their magical first acts. Netflix has already turned the amazing trick once, evolving from a deliver-by-mail DVD subscription business - empowered by an industry happy to take their money for a small place at the table - into the clear streaming leader, empowered by an industry ready to take their money (especially in the first few years, establishing the model), not realizing how the new place at the table being created was of greater cultural significance than any one of them.
Elon Musk made something great by bringing companies together and making PayPal, then moving to SpaceX, and then Tesla.
Buzzfeed mixed some very serious journalism with infantile quizzes, listicles, and cute kittens to become a dominant brand in the brave new world of social media, eventually acquiring The Huffington Post when they got past the point of making sense financially. (Ironically, HuffPo will survive within Buzzfeed 4.0… for now.)
But after a while, no matter how much you spin your revisionist history about yourself, it’s time to stop licking your own balls (a job you have to do because even your sycophants have become tired of doing it for you.., except for Rich Greenfield), and dealing with what’s next.
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