Five years ago, in 2007, everybody was thinking social and mobile, just like today. The author talks about how technology changes radically, but none of the businesses he cited (Digg, Twitter, Facebook) are enabled by new technology, or solving new problems. Everybody is just trying to milk the social cow over and over again, there's nothing new short-term. All the exciting ones are long-term (Self-driving cars? SpaceX? Graphene? Cheap genome research?).
The value of short term thinking
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Re: The value of short term thinking
#32Technology may change quickly, but what doesn't change so quickly are the needs and wants of customers or the rules of economics. Long term viability is still essential for shareholder value – but not necessarily VC value. But, I digress... Yes, life has changed since 2007, but many of the same fundamental problems still persist. If I may get on a soap-box that I've borrowed from others wiser and more well-spoken, wh…
The reality is that the people investing the money don't want hard problems.
They just want scale, viral growth, network effect, more ways to sell advertising. Most of the money today is on completely superfluous crap, and that's why the economy is on the mud.
Why invest on improving individuals, when you can just distract them and reach for their pockets?
Re: The value of short term thinking
#33The real problem is that the industries with problems don't want to be fixed and very few people want to bother with the same red tape or worse that Square, Tesla and Über have to deal with. Who wants to invest their life only to be shot down bureaucrats? Notice that those 3 firms were started by entrepreneurs with companies already under their belt.
Re: The value of short term thinking
#34Technology may change quickly, but what doesn't change so quickly are the needs and wants of customers or the rules of economics. Long term viability is still essential for shareholder value – but not necessarily VC value. But, I digress... Yes, life has changed since 2007, but many of the same fundamental problems still persist. If I may get on a soap-box that I've borrowed from others wiser and more well-spoken, wh…
The reality is that the people investing the money don't want hard problems. They just want scale, viral growth, network effect, more ways to sell advertising. Most of the money today is on completely superfluous crap , and that's why the economy is on the mud. Why invest on improving individuals, when you can just distract them and reach for their pockets?
As I said previously – solving bigger/hard problems is one path to long-term success.
IMHO, this is one of the more clear cases where VC interests are directly at odds with the interests of post-IPO investors – particularly the ones more likely to be interested in long-term gains (people investing for retirement/retirement funds among others)
Re: The value of short term thinking
#35Nobody believed mobile would be the fastest growing segment of tech I disagree about this one. In 2007: + AdMob raised $15M for their Series B from Accel and Sequoia. + Google announced their Android platform (after having purchased it in 2005). + Apple launches the iPhone. I would say those are major examples of the big bets large corporations and investors were placing on mobile being a fast, if not the fastest gro…
Also in 2007, the eeepc showed everyone that there was immense potential in small form factor computers.
Re: The value of short term thinking
#36I fail to see the point of this article.
Since when thiking long term has to do with not adapting to its market ??
I've never heard of any company which fallowed to the letter a 5 years plan to the letter now, or 15 years ago.
If you think that, please stop.
The value of short term thinking is that it's more fitted to our time. We do not build companies to last forever, we might as well cut the cost of thinking long term and try stuff until it's profitable enough to be bought...