Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Can I walk with you?
He pulled out the AirPods right away, said hello, and asked where George was headed. George was walking to the office, which he does from his house some days. The investor asked if he could walk along, and George said yes.
They walked for 20 to 25 minutes. George could easily have said no, that he was busy, and instead he made the time and shared his walk. At KKR, the investor had been so many levels below both founders that he worked for people who worked for people who worked for them, and both had still made time for him.
That fit how the founders worked. They never left the field and were out talking to people, and if someone was interesting, they wanted to spend time with them.
Why did venture firms cluster on Sand Hill Road?
Menlo Park's Sand Hill Road sits beside Stanford University and near the semiconductor and computer companies of Silicon Valley. Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital, both founded in 1972, ended up on the road, and other firms followed. The road's name has since become shorthand for Silicon Valley venture capital.
How do chance meetings shape workplaces?
In the 1970s, MIT professor Thomas Allen studied communication among engineers in research labs and found that the likelihood of regular contact fell steeply as the distance between desks grew. Contact dropped to near the level of people in different buildings once desks were about 30 meters apart. The pattern became known as the Allen curve.
Where did management by walking around start?
Hewlett-Packard managers practiced it in the 1970s, wandering the floor to talk with employees directly rather than waiting for reports. Authors Tom Peters and Robert Waterman popularized the practice and its name in their 1982 book In Search of Excellence. The book studied 43 companies it considered excellent.
More from Joys of Compounding
