"One of the most important jobs of a CEO is to aggressively define and pursue a growth agenda for his or her business."

"Virtually all businesses, even hyper-growth ones, inevitably experience slower growth as they get larger, with their growth rates falling relentlessly back down to Earth over time."

"I call this effect “gravity” and it will weigh down even the most promising of companies — unless a CEO can find a way to accelerate growth and positively change the long-term growth trajectory of the business."

"M&A, on the other hand, felt both desperate and was controlled in a separate part of the organization. So we quickly turned our attention to focusing on product innovation."

"But auctions intimidated many prospective users who expressed preference for the ease and simplicity of fixed price formats."

"Interestingly, our research suggested that our online auction users were biased towards men, who relished the competitive aspect of the auction. So the first major innovation we pursued was to implement the (revolutionary!) concept of offering items for a fixed price on ebay.com, which we termed “buy-it-now.”"

"Buy-it-now complemented auctions well, brought new users and new listings to the site, and became a very important driver of growth for many years."

"Each of these innovations supported the growth of the business and helped to keep that gravity at bay."

"I came to call this process of layering in new innovations on top of the core business “adding layers to the cake.”"

"Much of the natural effort in the organization is spent on chasing optimization of the core business. This makes sense, as small improvements in a big business can have a meaningful impact."

"But there is huge potential leverage to adding layers of new, complementary businesses on top of the core (aka “cake”)."

"In the ebay.com case, buy-it-now, stores, features, checkout and PayPal integration were all new initiatives that layered on top of the core business but added something new to it."

"At the same time, the international and payments layers grew from virtually nothing in 2000 to around 60% of the company’s revenue by 2005. As a result, the overall company grew dramatically faster than its original core business and successfully fought off the impact of gravity for a decade."

"At PayPal, the key layers we implemented there were international expansion, improving PayPal’s offerings for merchants who wanted to sell outside of the eBay platform (called “Merchant Services”), and starting to offer credit on top of our payments business."

"During my time at OpenTable, the key layers we introduced included building a robust set of mobile applications that expanded diner use cases, expanding internationally (again), introducing a new “Connect” product that meaningfully increased the addressable market of restaurants, and developing yield generation products that helped restaurants attract additional diners."

"Steve Jobs and the Apple team relentlessly added new layers at Apple that sat on top of their original core business of computers, including the iPod, iTunes, the iPhone and the iPad."

"Amazon in recent years has innovated incredibly skillfully beyond their core physical merchandise business, adding layers such as Prime, digital goods, Amazon Web Services and the Kindle and now Fire digital devices."

"Innovation clearly is THE success model on the Internet. It explains how Google emerged as the dominant player in search, despite being relatively late to market and competing with established companies like Yahoo and Microsoft."

"These winning Net companies are incredibly strong at product innovation. They invest in it, they create cultures that support it, they prize it and they reward it."

"The best innovations improve and compliment the core business of a company, taking advantage of and enhancing its most valuable assets."

"The further a company strays from its core in its innovation, the longer the odds of success."

"Core to the CEO’s job is to rise above the day-to-day requirements to keep his or her vision far out on the horizon, proactively delivering new innovations today that have the impact to materially boost the long-term growth of the business in the future."