Quotes from Adam Lashinsky

Uber has a lot of money, and they've hired a lot of good people, and they have the capacity to professionalize.

Innovation has its limits, of course, and Salesforce has proved adept at supplementing its growth with acquisitions, a tool long available to older rivals like Oracle and SAP.

The reliable way great conglomerates grew over time was by adding new products and buying new companies. IBM moved from mainframe to PCs.

AIM started in 1997, and I remember when I started using it in earnest, in 1999, when I joined TheStreet.com from 'The San Jose Mercury News'. We digital journalism pioneers communicated obsessively by AIM, and as a newbie, I recall being amazed that the whole newsroom was 'chatting' this way.

Before its immature ways caught up with it, Uber got bigger and went further than Webvan ever did. But it bleeds money, courts controversy, and makes enemies like no company Ive ever seen.

Innovation, like creativity, is an amorphous concept. It's the holy grail of business, but achieving it - even merely explaining it - is lightning-in-a-bottle difficult.

Global affairs consultant Ian Bremmer, founder of the Eurasia Group, has started a newsletter called 'Signal,' aimed at millennials. For years, Bremmer has written a maddeningly all-lowercase yet fascinating weekly newsletter on geopolitics.

I've written repeatedly about the quest by corporations everywhere to transform themselves digitally.

The rap against Tesla has always been of the 'yes, but' variety. Yes, it's a fine artisanal designer and manufacturer of electric cars, and its CEO is one of the few business leaders alive for whom the label 'visionary' isn't hyperbolic.

If one's man's trash is another man's treasure, then one industry's potential failure is another's opportunity.

What makes Samsung so mysterious is that it's not altogether clear who leads the company or what its leaders do. The company follows an avowedly Confucian model of consensus-driven decision-making, values bone-crushingly hard work, and shows tremendous deference to the founding Lee family, despite its lack of a controlling interest in its shares.

Salesforce acquires companies - it has snapped up 55 since 2006 - that are either more innovative or that have pioneered market segments that Salesforce hasn't yet cracked.

ICG wasn't an index fund so much as a collection of venture-capital investments focused on so-called business-to-business Internet companies.

The cloud, for a while more of a metaphor than a giant business, is re-ordering all sorts of industries.

When I published a book earlier this year about Uber, the most common question I got about it was how many of the tumultuous events of 2017 I was able to include. My gag-line response: I managed to cover the first 17 scandals of the year, but not Nos. 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, and so on.

Sony's Walkman far predated the iPod. Nokia ruled smartphones before Apple.

Bernard Tyson, CEO of Kaiser Permanente, sees technology as an augmentation to current healing tools - but not a replacement for human kindness, an integral part of healthcare.

Facebook can spend and talk endlessly to defend itself so long as it keeps printing money.

As a new Googler, Porat spent some time learning the words that describe the Googley people who work in those buildings.

As China's retailing champion, Alibaba makes Amazon look like a company that carefully picks its spots. Sure, Amazon does e-tailing. So does Alibaba.

Alphabet would be a holding company to house its wackier or noncore efforts - like its Verily life sciences, Waymo self-driving cars, and Loon Internet balloon projects - while Google's advertising-oriented business would stand apart and continue to drive the company's finances.

Apple does a very good job of not letting its competitors know what it is working on, and Apple does a very good job of not confusing customers by causing them to anticipate what the next new thing is going to be and then causing those customers not to buy the products that are on the shelves now.

Broadcom is the descendent of a nearly 60-year-old unit of the original Hewlett-Packard. Semiconductor companies are like enterprise software companies: they don't die easily.

The summer before my senior year in college, I talked my way into an unpaid internship on Capitol Hill. I was able to have this stimulating resume- and network- enhancing experience because my parents could afford to keep me clothed, housed, and fed in the nation's capital for 10 weeks.