Robert Fripp On Business

By Robert Scoble
Expert Author
Article Date: 2006-01-30

Robert Fripp is a famous guitarist. He's in the audience aggregation business.

Same business that Google, MSN, Yahoo, and many companies that appear on TechCrunch are in, by the way. He has a lengthy post on why he chose to do business with Microsoft. It's a must read for businesspeople, particularly with all this venture capital talk that's been going around lately. Here's a key line:

"In business, personal connections are not everything; just, nearly everything."

Oh, I grok that. It's why my cell phone number is always going to be on the home page of my blog. You can call me anytime (if I'm sleeping I may not answer, particularly if Maryam is throwing my phone against the wall. Heheh). At Microsoft you always have a personal connection (or you can build one).

I'd go even deeper than Robert Fripp. I do business with people I know and can read and can find in search engines. If you can't be found in Yahoo, Google, or MSN's engine, well, how about fixing that particular bug?