“..In Defy, Dr. Sunita Sah brilliantly reframes our understanding of defiance—from an act of mere rebellion to a vital tool for personal growth and social change. This book is a powerful, transformative read for anyone who’s ever felt the tension between doing what’s expected and doing what’s right..”—Daniel H. Pink, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Power of Regret
Many early-stage companies with venture capital funding pride themselves currently of having a remote workforce. Not realizing, that during the early stages of building a company, quick collaboration and continuous on-site communications are most important in developing creative strategies and competitive strengths. (see whiteboards)
I can only support these comments ” If you want to encourage radical innovation, you’ve got to bring people together. You cannot just rely on digital infrastructure.” (University of Pittsburgh, Social Scientist Lingfei Wu, recent study in Nature magazine)
I’ve made this discovery, while working remotely, needing to share ideas to build competitive strengths and accelerate the time to customer deployment. It simply takes much longer, and many individuals need more time to understand the changes required, for improved operations.
Given these discoveries, I do have the impression that office space will become a more important consideration to bring creative and intelligent employees and executives together, for continuous and agile communications and better results. As the phrase goes “a good idea may be worth $1 million.”
With the very low interest rates over the past 10+ years, many very young MBAs with a background in Finance are working in the venture capital industry, not as analysts, but either as observers or even as board members.
While they are intelligent and may find their job and university education sexy on paper, I do question their lack of experience and expertise. (Most often, I wonder how many have ever worked “hands-on” in the particular industry and an early stage company environment.)
Questions and points to review.
Have your finance MBA VCs ever written and funded their own business plan successfully ?
70%+ of companies are not able to return their initial investment to their investors.
VCs today are often less knowledgeable about the industry and the technology than the entrepreneurs trying to run the company.
The more money venture capital teams manage, the less time they have to nurture and advise entrepreneurs. Yes, there actually is a need to get experienced CEOs and senior members on board, to support the investors with running their early stage company operations particular when it comes to sales and marketing.
Venture capitalists invest in good people and good ideas.. no, not really – more importantly they invest in good industries. High growth and accelertion within a particular industry vertical are most important to investors.
Indentifiying competent management is very difficult. Many young companies are run by techies today – often with zero knowledge of basic sales and marketing principles. ( A competent finance MBA on the board will not make a big difference, and much of their work will eventually be replaced by a smart algorithm and AI model)
(A special thank you to the team and Bob Zider in Menlo, Park)
Generally speaking ” If you do something with open source that is irresponsible and that causes harm, you should go to jail – just like if you kill someone when driving a car..” ( Wendy Hall, United Nations AI advisory body)
For the last few weeks, I have been speaking to early-stage companies and their young team of developers and entrepreneurs. Many are still building a technical solution with various components, and when I asked the question where they are in the market cycle, they are not able to answer the question. What market cycle ? To help them move forward with their marketing and sales strategy, I encourage them to read yet another book, see below, currently in its third edition.
