Time, Timing and Being Timid

It’s common knowledge that a key factor in the success of any venture investment is timing. Enter a nascent market too early and you learn many lessons but burn though capital without gaining market traction. Enter too late and you end up going toe to toe with large companies who have had time, the key factor in this whole discussion, to react to emerging customer needs.

Right now, we are entering a very uncertain time. Investors are clearly and publicly tightening their wallets (I wont be the 10,000 blog to post a link to the Sequoia pitch) and quite rightly encouraging their portfolio companies to cut back. The natural reaction for any company is to hang on to their existing strategy, take a more hands on approach to execution (CEO as chief sales guy) and try to weather the storm – be it 6 months or 2 years.

The challenge is that recessions slow things down. Customers wait to start buying cycles, existing buying cycles get delayed and phantom buying cycles happen more often. In a recession, its less likely that an existing startup company will actually be able to carve out a viable market position with their current offering. The simple reality is that lengthening the adoption cycle both gives bigger companies time to respond and ups the odds that a new disruptive innovation will appear in the form of next-gen start-ups. The technology adoption curve gets elongated. Simply put, timing changes.

Start-ups build value by disrupting existing markets and creating new ones. New market dynamics should be met with new business strategies. Products, go to market strategies and economic models need to be re-thought. This is the reality of markets. Unfortunately, recession forces us to face this reality at the most inopportune time – when money is tight and often when we are scaling back on our plans, reducing spending and cutting staff. Exploring new strategies at this point is not easy. However, each downturn has spawned a new generation of startup who combined business and technology innovation to disrupt the status quo.

Simply put, now is not the time to be timid!

I'll be keeping my Blackberry

Wow, how things have changed when it comes time to phone home.

In 1977, I bummed a quarter, walked to the pay phone, called the operator with the borrowed quarter, reversed the charges and phoned home.

Today is a bit different.

I hear word across the family room that my recently off-to-college daughter is online on Facebook. This tells me she is in her dorm room and near communications gear. Important because I'm not part of her facebook network (see http://devriestechblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/facebook-effect.html for why).

So, I send her a short text message which gets a near immediate reply. The mouse has taken the cheese. I have a Blackberry which means I tend to send text messages longer than most emails. I reply with a good beefy message...and shortly the phone rings.

"hi peanut. Great to hear from you. Whats up?" said dad.

"Your text messages are too long. I had to call." replied daughter.

Game, set, match to dad!

In spite of the the great features on the iPhone, I'll be keeping my Backberry thank you very much.

Microsoft Irrelevent?

The headline of the attached article "GE Drops Google, Selects Zoho" , while quite interesting missed (or perhaps captures) the bigger story. Ok - this is a big deal. One of America's greatest corporations has selected upstart Zoho over tech. titan Google for an enterprise wide, 400,000 desktop rollout of a solution.

We are talking about a major desktop (you might say office) software decision and Microsoft doesn't even get mentioned.

Ouch.