The creation of the 'Goldie Scholars' program is an acknowledgment that knowledge isn't enough.
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.
Tesla has humiliated established carmakers with its brilliant vision. But Detroit, Turin, Stuttgart, and so on have understood scale as well as capital allocation for decades. Such gargantuan tasks could yet humiliate Tesla.
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.
Porat is among a handful of top people who work for both Alphabet and Google. As such, there's a regular cadence to her week.
Amazon has suffered quarters-long profit droughts. Alphabet has given its investors agita over profligate spending on non-core products. Microsoft's growth - if not its profit engine - stalled for years, causing its stock to idle, too.
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.
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.
AIM was so quaint, it organized users around 'buddy lists.' In a time before smartphones, AIM was powerful and intoxicating, a way for a generation that once had called people on the phone to communicate in quick bursts from their computers.
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.
Dynamic pricing - charging more when goods and services are in high demand and short supply and less when the opposite is true - isn't new. Gasoline retailers, hoteliers, and airlines have been deploying the technique for years.
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.
If you crave further confirmation that Silicon Valley is a magical place where magical thinking reigns, consider the tale of Roku, the video streaming company that filed to go public Friday, when alert people everywhere were headed out for a long weekend.
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.
ICG became a dot-com joke, a one-stock example of extreme hubris on the part of its management and the investment bankers and sell-side analysts who embarrassed themselves by pumping it up.
Amazon led with online bookselling, web services, and drones.
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.
Cannibalization is by far the most difficult feat any established, successful company can pull off.
Salesforce employees are so immersed in the fervor over their offerings and their unique workplace that they are nearly incredulous to learn that few people beyond the legions of customers using Salesforce's product have the faintest idea what the company does.
Amazon has a good record with customers, who are confident the retailer will give them the lowest price. Entering their home will be another thing altogether.
