This S+B article studies the dot-com failure rates and concludes that there was too little, not too much entry. The real problem was that there wasn’t sufficiently diverse range of exploratory investments. A herd based investing paradigm was in place. Had there been more diversity maybe more businesses would have failed, but these failures would have been smaller and would have provided less costly lessons.
Archive for the 'investing' Category
Don’t Fall For the “Get Big Fast” Strategy
Published by March 29th, 2007 in investing and entrepreneurship. 2 CommentsIt’s the Season of Merger Speculations
Published by March 20th, 2007 in investing and software industry. 3 CommentsMany merger ideas are doing the rounds. Take your pick: Google buys Intuit, Microsoft acquires Yahoo, Apple swallows Adobe. Ironically, all this is at a time when there is talk about a PE buyout of Symantec. It’s so easy to forget that big mergers often don’t work out in the long run!
A Different Startup Mantra
Published by March 3rd, 2007 in investing, entrepreneurship and organizational design. 4 CommentsThere are two startup worlds out there. One is about comparative selling and the other one is about displacement selling. One is about leveraging disruptive technology and the other is about leveraging exogenous effects. One is about mastery over disintermediation, commoditization, or offshoring to reduce time-to-market; the other is about using it help the customer do legacy stuff for less. These subtle but significant differences in the startup mantra have big implications for entrepreneurs and VCs.
Why Indian VCs Need To Be Changing Gears in 2007
Published by February 26th, 2007 in investing. 2 Comments2006 saw VC investments double in India. That momentum continues. What should be qualitatively different in 2007?
Energy Sector: Is it Venture Capital or Vanity Capital?
Published by February 14th, 2007 in investing and energy industry. 4 CommentsThere is lots of new venture money going into the energy sector. But it’s not clear whether the startups will reap the benefits of the resulting innovations. It appears that the BigCo’s like ADM and GE will walk away with the value that’s created. Right now, just like space travel, its vanity capital investing that’s happening rather than venture investing.
Musings about Role of Partnerships in Startups
Published by February 5th, 2007 in investing, entrepreneurship and organizational design. 3 CommentsThere are two types of opportunities for startups – one arising from new consumption and the other from value chain transformation. The startup firm evolution is different for these two kinds of opportunities. In the first case, thought leadership goes into creating an offering power that is then leveraged to acquire customers followed by partners. In the second case, thought leadership goes first in building a category power which then underpins strategic partnering and customer acquisition. Read on…
Mobile Business Model Success Scorecard v1
Published by January 9th, 2007 in investing, entrepreneurship and mobile industry. 2 CommentsThere is no doubt that mobile is the new frontier, especially in Asia, for a host of applications. However if you are a startup, getting it right has been tough. Several conditions need to be met. I have pulled together a business model self-assessment scorecard that’s probably over-simplified, opinionated and incomplete. Take a look…
Hot in Customers Eyes, Just Not in VC’s Eyes
Published by January 3rd, 2007 in investing, software industry and adaptable infrastucture. 1 CommentJoseph Landman has politely but firmly taken me to task for my earlier post, “The New Data Center Leading-Edge”. In spirit of friendly and constructive conversation, I’d like to post my reply… Having a growing market doesn’t make a segment “hot”. What would make HPC hot is if it was part of the current data center leading-edge. Alternatively, a “hot” startup can still happen if there is a disruptive game plan that the investors can put their arms around.
An Indian Dream
Published by December 28th, 2006 in investing, entrepreneurship and bottom-of-the-pyramid. 0 CommentsI just got back from my short vacation, opened The Economist and was flipping the pages when a picture of Sanjeev Aggarwal caught my attention. There is a nice profile of him, called Delhi Dreams, in the Face Value section of this issue. What a pleasant surprise! For me Sanjeev represents an important new trend. I believe that we are close to a tipping point in seeing many more “India-out” ventures…
Indian Drug Discovery Partnerships: Fad or a Long-term Trend
Published by November 30th, 2006 in investing and biotech/pharma industry. 0 CommentsTo me it appears that more evidence is in that the pharma/biotech value chain is modularizing, specialist firms are emerging and the industry footprint is going global. There have been 6 new R&D collaboration deals involving Indian firms in the last 3 months alone. How does this square with Prof. Gary Pisano’s view that the biotech sector lends itself better to vertical integration than to a Silicon Valley type ecosystem of independent specialists?
Questioning Orbit Change in the Pharma/Biotech Industry
Published by November 15th, 2006 in investing and biotech/pharma industry. 0 CommentsI am of the opinion that the global drug value-chain is morphing. Part of the change taking place is that specialist firms are stepping in place of in-house teams and as a result the value chain is going global… Prof Gary Pisano… calls for a rollback of the value chain modularization and a return to vertical integration… This is an important industry debate that one needs to watch.
This notion that the VC business model is broken in the Web 2.0 world is doing the rounds lately… So the way I see it, the VC business model is not broken, it only needs an adjustment as to where it is applied…
