TILE FINDERS The Perfect Gift for Absent-Minded Techies The holiday shopping season is underway. Odds are you’ve already crossed off a few big-ticket items. Once those are out of the way, it’s time to start looking for
fun, creative stocking stuffers and other little gifts. A tech company named Tile produces a product that may just do the trick for the tech- lover on your list. When you misplace your phone, you probably have somebody call it for you. Unfortunately, you can’t call your keys or wallet when you lose them … until now. Tile makes tiny squares that you can attach easily to anything you like. Once affixed, you can use the accompanying app to make your items beep just like a phone would. With Tile, those panicked mornings spent looking for your keys will be a thing of the past. Tile offers their products in various sizes, bundles, and design styles. They also sell custom adhesives that will allow you to stick your Tiles to anything without fear of damage. The battery life on a single Tile is over a year, and Tiles can be recycled through the company, so you’ll never need to worry about charging it.
WARBY PARKER SAW THE FUTURE OF EYEGLASSES David Gilboa, one of the co-founders of eyewear company Warby Parker, realized something was broken with the industry when he lost a pair of designer sunglasses. “The iPhone 3G had just come out, so I went to the Apple store and I paid $200 for one,” he recalls. “It did all these magical things that people couldn’t have even contemplated a few years earlier. That made me start thinking about why I was being asked to pay $700 for a new pair of glasses. Something just didn’t compute.” In a classic “there’s got to be a better way” moment, Gilboa and his three co-founders set out to provide inexpensive, stylish glasses to consumers around the world. To do that, they knew they would need to both produce and retail their wares. “It was really about bypassing retailers, bypassing the middlemen who would mark up lenses 3–5 times what they cost, so we could just transfer all of that cost directly to consumers and save them money,” explains Neil Blumenthal, another co-founder. To cut costs even further, they focused on e-commerce rather than traditional brick-and-mortar retail. Investors were incredibly skeptical of this idea. They thought that nobody would buy glasses online, because it’s so hard to tell if you’ll like them when you actually put them on. To quell these fears, Warby Parker created a home try-on program that allows customers to have five sets of frames shipped to their home for free. The customer can keep whichever they like and return whichever they don’t. Just as integral to Warby Parker’s success is their design sensibility. Their selection of frames, which has grown steadily over the years, leans toward classic, elegant style. Materials are top-notch and the quality is what you’d expect from designer glasses. While their focus wasn’t on storefronts at the outset, they now have dozens of outposts throughout the country. Warby Parker’s rise from a derided idea to a billion-dollar company proves that if you provide a quality product at a reasonable price, customers will seek you out. LONG BEFORE ANYONE ELSE
Surely there’s somebody on your list who can never find their wallet. Grab them some Tiles and they’ll thank you for years to come.
JOHN DOERR’S MEASURE WHAT MATTERS Will Revolutionize Your Goal Setting
Every business sets goals, but very few go about it in the most effective way. John Doerr, a venture capitalist who’s worked with the likes of Google and Amazon, has helped dozens of companies kick their goal-setting into high gear. In his new book, “Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World With OKRs,” he reveals his tried-and- true method for creating goals that stick.
The key, Doerr argues, is a system of objectives and key results (OKRs). “Objectives and key results are the yin and yang of goal setting,” he writes. Objectives provide an organization with clear targets, while key results offer a specific, measurable path to attaining them. There should be different OKRs for every level and department of your organization, and they should all be shared with the entire company. As Doerr puts it, “Transparency seeds collaboration.” Doerr doesn’t just describe this system in abstract; he brings it to life with stories from his own experience. Chapters focus on companies Doerr has worked with and how they used OKRs to help grow their businesses. If your company could use a better way of setting and achieving goals, put “Measure What Matters” on your holiday reading list.
(855) 455-5035 AZCOMP Technologies, Inc. www.azcomp.com • 3
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