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Fortune's Lashinsky Penning an "Inside Apple" Book

Kara Swisher — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 20:16:38 +0000

Adam Lashinsky, Fortune magazine’s high-profile Silicon Valley reporter, will be penning a book titled “Inside Apple: How America’s Most Admired — and Secretive — Company Really Works.”

An expansion of a well-read article that Lashinsky wrote for the publication earlier this year, the book will be available on Jan. 18, 2012 from Business Plus, an imprint of Hachette Book Group.

Lashinsky’s will be the second Apple tome to be coming out that will shed more light inside the workings of Silicon Valley’s most iconic company.

In November, former Time Inc. writer and editor Walter Isaacson’s much anticipated biography about Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs will be released by Simon & Schuster.

“Steve Jobs” has been written with cooperation from Jobs, who has not done so in the past.

Lashinsky said in an interview today he did not garner Jobs’s help on the book, but did manage to get a deep inside look at the company.

“Doing an unauthorized book is harder,” said Lashinsky. “But what you get is well-reported information, which is outside the message Apple wants to deliver, and there is so much good stuff, this company is worth far more than an article.”

Lashinsky has been a longtime reporter in tech, including covering Apple, a company that is notoriously secretive and difficult to report about.

Still, Lashinsky has written a lot about the maker of the groundbreaking Mac, iPod, iPhone and iPad devices, including a piece in 2008 about recently installed CEO Tim Cook, titled “The Genius Behind Steve: Could the Operations Whiz Run The Company Someday?”

Inside Apple will be more about the entire company, which has vaulted from near death only 15 years ago to become one of the most highly valued companies in tech and, in fact, globally.

The publisher promises a lot of insidery facts, including, “how Apple creates killer products, forges intense bonds with consumers, and gets what it wants from suppliers … the lessons about leadership, product design and marketing are universal, and they should appeal to anyone hoping to bring some of that Apple magic to their own company, career or creative endeavor.”

Lashinsky said these are important lessons for others to explore.

“So much of what Apple does stands decades of business teaching on its head, because they just don’t do things the way other companies do,” he said. “The rest of the business world might want to pay attention.”

Indeed, they should.

Almost Famous: Mehdi Maghsoodnia of BookRenter

Drake Martinet — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 09:35:13 +0000

A feature wherein All Things Digital looks at up-and-coming and innovative start-ups you should know about.

This week: We took a coffee break (and made an interview and video) with Mehdi Maghsoodnia, CEO of BookRenter, a company that claims to be “numero uno” in online textbook rentals, a bone of contention between it and larger competitor Chegg.

Who: Mehdi Maghsoodnia

What: Chief Executive Officer

Why: BookRenter is in a battle with competitor Chegg. Mehdi freely admits that Chegg holds more market share, but says his model has the staying power to outlast it. Presumably, Chegg begs to differ.

Where: bookrenter.com (Web site); @bookrenter (Twitter); Campbell, Calif. (analog place)

Who else: BookRenter is in a battle for the hearts and minds of college students everywhere. On one side, it competes with college bookstores, Amazon (AMZN), and a trial-rental program from Barnes & Noble (BKS). Once a customer goes the way of rental rather than purchase, BookRenter has to fight with Chegg, the textbook service now led by longtime Silicon Valley exec Dan Rosensweig and whose eggshell has been stuffed with $144 million in venture funding.

Five Stats You Won’t Find in His Facebook Profile

Worst Job Ever: I used to sweep the grounds for a hotel in San Francisco, called Roberts at the Beach Motel (it’s still there). It was right next to the zoo, and the wind would blow all the dust, sand and junk into the hotel, and my job was just to sweep the floor. That was not at all fun.

Geek Crush: I’m a fanatic in terms of business models, and I track the careers of people I admire. I keep track of Maynard Webb, who used to be the COO at eBay (EBAY). I track people with clever minds and clever ideas.

Gadget of the Moment: I love my Apple (AAPL) iPhone–for the first time recently I traveled without my laptop. It was great. The app environment is fascinating. If you look on my phone, the apps are in two distinct sections. One is all the games that keep my kids busy, and the second category is functional things for me. News feeders, banking…and I watch all kinds of videos on the TED app when I’m traveling.

International Businessman of Mystery: I was born in Iran. Then, we moved to London. I traveled a lot and lived all over. I realized early on that a consequence of that is I’m culturally very unmarketable. It’s pretty impossible to market to me. Which, by definition, means I’m not the greatest marketer, because I don’t know what makes people want to buy things.

It’s All in the Family: I sit on the board of Nature Air, an airline in Costa Rica. It’s the first regional green airline, and it’s the family business.

Bio in 140 Characters

Mehdi grew up global, but landed in Silicon Valley. He spent time as a VC then moved to head CafePress. Now he’s CEO at BookRenter.

The Five Questions

Let’s get right into this. How are you guys different from Chegg?

When I was at CafePress, we were the biggest online t-shirt retailer in the world. We spent a lot of time getting shirts in from China, organizing them, putting them in bins, tracking them, printing them and so on. I observed how much of our management bandwidth and resources went into back-end fulfillment as a retailer. I came out of CafePress and was sitting on the venture side when I saw Chegg and BookRenter. I said, “These are two teams satisfying specific demands out there, but with totally different business models.”

Chegg was trying to do everything–taking on warehousing, buying the books, etc. There were many companies doing that, by the way. Amazon among them. The BookRenter team was clever, and they said, “Let’s flip this on its head.” Investing in a book as stock is a losing venture, because your individual investment on the book loses value over time. You also lose money on leasing the warehouse, forklifts, all of it.

At BookRenter, we have all kinds of partnerships that handle those logistics, including recent partnerships with school bookstores themselves. We are in a cyclical business, where maybe four months out of the year we are handling books, and, in the other eight, the books are in the students’ hands. Our costs adjust within those cycles as quickly as changes happen.

How do you track and price all the books when you don’t own them?

So, most of the business is done today on an inventory capitalization model. That is to say, you have a position on what books you have. Everyone buys books and then has to find a match for that book in a rental relationship.

BookRenter takes a very different approach. Our software system creates rental relationships in real time, which means it figures out prices and availability for every new rental. If you come to us and say you want to rent a biology book, the system turns around and queries our suppliers and decides who will be able to get us that book at the lowest overall cost. Our cost algorithm is complex and takes into account things like the reliability of the provider for meeting its commitment on that book.

Once the determination has been made, only then do we take a position on that book and add it to inventory. I can offer as many books as [Chegg] or anyone else, because I’m offering that book virtually. I only pay when I have a paying customer.

You’ve got a lot to say about how you are going to gain on Chegg. Is this really a market that is worth the fight?

Oh yes, the market is growing very fast. We saw 300 percent growth year over year in January. The textbook business is a $9-billion-a-year industry. Someday we hope that a third of that is rentals. The value proposition is there. Renting is cheaper than buying. It’s even cheaper than buying used. Eighteen months from now, we are still going to be a smaller player, but we have the longevity.

Do you do this for the competition, or is it something else that drives you?

I’ll be honest. The best possible outcome for us is that Chegg stays prosperous. Both of us are fighting the same battle in terms of converting some of the buying market to a renting market. So, we are all in the same market development boat. But what I really like about this is the process. I see our business as a 0.9 version, so there are so many things we can still work on.

Organizationally and market-wise, it’s a very exciting thing to design a system for. You have to balance the needs of all kinds of partners. It’s like playing multidimensional chess with very good players. It’s just fun. Also, the growth factor is great. If I had to solve these problems in a business that wasn’t growing, that’s not a lot of fun.

I’ve been there man, that’s deadly. You put a lot of intellectual work into it and you can’t get anyone to care.

As a current student, I’ve got to ask: How have you dealt with undoubtedly the biggest customer problem–highlighting?

[Laughs] You know, that was a real issue early on. Our early policy was no highlighting at all, of any kind. It turned out that students didn’t seem to mind [the highlighting], and in fact many liked it. It was like someone had already done the work of showing them the important parts of the book. Today, we will only charge for damage if there’s been a real issue, like, someone spilled water all over the book and really ruined it.

The In Living Color Interview

[ See post to watch video ]

PC Sales Crashing Like an Unpatched Windows Machine

John Paczkowski — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 19:00:47 +0000

Billionaire Warren Buffett says the economy will be in a shambles throughout “2009–and, for that matter, probably well beyond.”

The same can apparently be said for the PC market. Research outfit Gartner on Monday warned that PC sales will suffer the “sharpest unit decline in history” this year. Gartner (IT) expects the PC industry to ship just 257 million units this year. That’s an 11.9 percent decline from 2008, one that easily eclipses the previous worst decline in 2001, when shipments fell 3.2 percent.

“The PC industry is facing extraordinary conditions as the global economy continues to weaken, users stretch PC lifetimes and PC suppliers grow increasingly cautious,” said Gartner research director George Shiffler. “Slower GDP growth will generally weaken demand and slow new penetration, lengthening PC lifetimes will reduce replacements, and supplier caution will keep inventories at historic lows.”

I’ll say. Gartner believes desktop shipments will decline a staggering 31.9 percent from 2008. Even an expected 80 percent spike in netbook sales, the lone bright spot in the market, won’t do much to temper that. Bad news for PC manufacturers like Dell (DELL) and HP (HPQ), and for suppliers like Microsoft (MSFT), Intel (INTC) and AMD (AMD) as well.

Insert Motorola "GONR" Joke Here

John Paczkowski — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 22:29:38 +0000

If Motorola were a Greek tragedy, we’d be at that point in the narrative where the company is just about to blind itself out of grief–with a pair of RAZRs, of course. Two reports issued today show an already grim scenario for Motorola growing markedly worse. The first, from MultiMedia Intelligence, shows the company’s share of the handset market in rapid decline, with Samsung and LG poised to surpass it. The second, from Thomas Weisel Partners, suggests Motorola’s 2008 and 2009 revenues will come in well below expectations. How far below? Analyst Matthew Sheerin cut his 2009 estimate for the company from a profit of three cents to a loss of 18 cents.

“We believe demand has deteriorated across most of the company’s core end-markets, with a particularly sharp slowdown in handsets, evidenced by a number of key supplier and competitor pre-announcements,” Sheerin wrote in a note to clients. “[The economic downturn] will make a recovery in the core handset business even more challenging and could accelerate cash burn.”

More ugly news for Motorola (MOT), which last week had its credit rating slashed to Junk by Standard & Poor’s.

Insert Motorola "GONR" Joke Here

John Paczkowski — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 22:29:38 +0000

More ugly news for Motorola (MOT), which last week had its credit rating slashed to Junk by Standard & Poor’s.