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Randy Komisar, Partner Kleiner Perkins talks about Business Models: I can’t imagine divorcing my values & principles from my work. Â Business in the final analysis is simply a tool by which we achieve some good. Â We achieve good for our customers, we achieve good for our employees & hopefully we achieve good for our communities? Â Its only a set of tools & its only as useful as the good it creates. Â I’m not a business person because I love the notion of being able to win at somebody else’s expense. Â Or to sell something at somebody else’s expense? Â Or to profit when somebody else is actually losing in the transaction. Â I love business because of the value it creates & that value has to have values attached to it. Â And if it becomes a shortcut for buying low & selling high then in fact it is not very valuable to society, its not very useful. Â It becomes very selfish & I don’t think that business at its heart needs to be selfish. Â Though unfortunately the way that its practised, we harness the greed of business to accomplish prosperity & to achieve success. Â And that’s a fairly fine line between what we think about as value & what we think about as valuable. So first & foremost, I cannot condone the divorcing of principles & values from the concept of business. Â I think that the two go hand in hand. Â I also think that the notion of business model is often misunderstood. Â A lot of what we are seeing as rickety in the last internet bubble was the lack of business models. Â The reality was that there were a lot of things that were at fault. Â Business models very often aren’t very evident early on, as you create value. Â Oftentimes that value particularly in things like internet media, internet content, is not directly transactable.
Video interview originally recorded in July 2010, re-edited Feb 2015