Daniel Shi

“Sue Decker, who was president at Yahoo, once asked me the simple question: “Why do people leak? Are they just disgruntled?” Since I liked Decker, I decided to level with her. “It’s easy to say they’re disgruntled or sneaky,” I replied. “But they leak because they feel like you’re not listening to them and that you do listen to me. And, therefore, employees believe the best way to effect change that needs to happen is to leak. To me.”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story

“The rise of Marvel Studios over the past decade has been one of the most extraordinary stories in Hollywood history. Utilizing a crew of second-rate superheroes and run by a team of unproven executives, Marvel upended the industry’s conventional wisdom. Previously, almost everyone in Hollywood believed that the general public was interested only in marquee superheroes like Batman and Spider-Man, and nobody would see a movie about Ant-Man or the Guardians of the Galaxy; that the resources and experience of major studios gave them an unbeatable advantage over upstarts; that tightly managing budgets on would-be global “event” movies was penny-wise but pound-foolish; that tying together the plots of disparate films was too risky because if one failed, they all would; and that the only Hollywood brand name that meant anything to consumers was Disney.”
― Ben Fritz, The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies

“What made the movie business unique in the history of corporate capitalism is captured in the screenwriter William Goldman’s maxim, true for many decades: “nobody knows anything.” No other industry pumped out so many products so frequently with so little foreknowledge of whether they would be any good. The only feasible business strategy, it appeared, was to sign up the best creative talent, trust your strongest hunches about what looked likely to appeal to millions of people, and hope you ended up with Back to the Future instead of Ishtar.”
― Ben Fritz, The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies

“Index There is no index, people. So, you have to read the whole book all the way through to see if you’re in it. I’ll be honest—most of you are not. Still, read it all, even though it’s hundreds of pages. Think of it like doom-scrolling Twitter—”
― Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A Tech Love Story