Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Herbert Allen taught that to a young banker at Allen and Company. The Allens show it in how loyal they are: they build friendships and stay with them. The lesson took decades to soak in.
The bet that banker made on a person was Barry Diller. He had planned to stay at one company for his whole career, but Diller was the one person he had told himself he would leave for. The move meant his salary was gone, and it went to a completely entrepreneurial new entity that Diller was building. His bets on people are probably the best ones he has made.
Why back founders over their ideas?
Georges Doriot, a Harvard Business School professor who founded American Research and Development in 1946, taught that the quality of the founder mattered more than the idea. ARD is often called the first publicly traded venture capital firm. Its 1957 investment in Digital Equipment Corporation became its best-known success.
Why do big companies fade while talent holds?
Industries shift, products age, and technologies change, while a person can carry skills and judgment from one setting to the next. A 2012 study by Richard Foster of Yale, published through the consulting firm Innosight, found that the average tenure of a company on the S&P 500 index fell from 61 years in 1958 to 18 years.
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