BUSINESS BLOGS
BUSINESS BLOGS
category: business
31 Jan 2008

Nick Carr published a piece titled The internet rewards the lazy and punishes the intrepid.  Given Carr’s usual rants, I thought the title was figurative, but it was in fact literal: he’s talking about navigation systems and what not.

But the title led me to think: what ever happened to long term business planning?  Are companies ever built to last or are they built to flip?  My vantage point is skewed because I work on the Web, where 1 year is an eternity for some and the notion of creating, building and holding a business for 10 years is nearly impossible (”it will be shut down or sold”).

This past weekend, a successful entrepreneur and reader of this blog emailed me to ask if I’d be at FOWA.

FOWA? I thought.  A quick search gave me the answer: the Future of Web Apps.  And so I clicked on the result and could not help but laugh when I read what was on the agenda.  One bullet point was this doozy:

Launch a web app in 40 minutes. 

Why would anyone want to build (let alone launch) a web app in 40 minutes?   How lazy, impatient and short-sighted have we become to aim for that.

Forget defensibility issues, what about common sense?

After YouTube got acquired by Google for $1.65B a mere two years after the URL was registered, Guba CEO Tom Mcinerney resigned and said: “I think we can all acknowledge that YouTube has won the big prize… Guba is at a crossroads, and we’re deciding whether to look for funding or to sell. I think we’re inclined to sell.” He said other execs might follow his exit as the company figures out its future. “The billion-dollar opportunity has kind of passed,” McInerney said. “(The executives) are bright, and they’re interested in going for the gold.”

This is enormously candid and a reflection of the mindset we seem to operate in, but is that not like saying Geocities won the big prize in social networking and Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, etc., were hatched in vain?

Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but it takes a lot more time than 2 years to build companies, let alone 40 minutes!

Some of the blame, of course, should rest with investors: be it angels or VCs.  Time is money and despite a lot of capital looking for bright people and brighter ideas, investors want to focus on what maximizes returns in a short time span.  So invariably this mindset trickles down to entrepreneurs, too.