Design has always been at the heart of our business.
Founders need to figure out what the message of the company is going to be.
I'm a massive believer in brands. Silicon Valley has tried to reprogram everybody to think brands aren't valuable. Or theirs are, but yours aren't.
Logos are a graphic extension of the internal realities of a company.
Doing risk sports had taught me another important lesson: never exceed your limits. You push the envelope and you live for those moments when you’re right on the edge, but you don’t go over. You have to be true to yourself; you have to know your strengths and limitations and live within your means. The same is true for a business. The sooner a company tries to be what it is not, the sooner it tries to ‘have it all,’ the sooner it will die.
We started off with a set of objectives for what we needed to communicate with the company's identity, created several proposals intended to meet those objectives, and picked the one that did the best job.
Generally, what people tend to underestimate is the cyborg nature of Groupon. We are a company that has the DNA of being both a technology company and a heavily operational company.
Brand inside is more important than brand outside for sustained success.
If we don't have great music, we're not any company.
I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn't just one aspect of the game; it is the game.
I don't think Yahoo can be Facebook tomorrow, and don't think Yahoo wants to be Facebook.
The heart and soul of the company is creativity and innovation.
I wanted to have a global company, so I chose a global name. Alibaba is easy to spell, and people everywhere associate that with "Open, Sesame," the command that Ali Baba used to open doors to hidden treasures in One Thousand and One Nights.
A principal struggle of many young companies is to establish an identity, a philosophical and emotional core, and LAIKA is no exception.
We've always operated on the thesis that a company can have a personality, that people can be themselves, and be very successful in business at the same time.
Company naming is a key part of the branding process, but it's subject to contrasting tastes and an illiquid domain name market that results in startups wasting their time during the branding process.
Our culture is the foundation for our company.
A good designer will actually design the company.
It's amazing when I walk through an expo hall and can't figure out what a company does just by walking past its booth.
We always try to be a unique company.
I have a company that is not Microsoft, called Corbis. Corbis is the operation that merged with Bettman Archives. It has nothing to do with Microsoft. It was intentionally done outside of Microsoft because Microsoft isn't interested.
The thing I have learned at IBM is that culture is everything.
We've always been an entertainment company.
When you have a company name that is to descriptive about what you do, you don't stand out.
If you've done a bit of journalism, everyone assumes you must be moving into PR. We're absolutely not becoming a PR agency and we're not turning into Brunswick. We will remain SRU, but we will be owned by the Brunswick Group. It's quite different.
