Welcome to our quarterly Newsletter Minds Over Matter.
Yogi Berra once said: "The future ain't what it used to be."
...and for some in the technology, investment and entrepreneurship business over the past two years, Yogi seems to have summed it up nicely. It seems those "go-go" years in the Valley are gone forever, many friends are jobless, real estate prices are in the tank, and Il Fornaio and Buck's just don't seem as crowded as they used to be.
However, talk to professionals that have been in the business 30+ years -- who have lived through the cycle of the 70's, 80's and 90's (one of our Advisors refers to this group fondly as "The Codgers"). They will tell you Yogi was right, but what he really meant to say is that "The future ain't what it used to be, because it just keeps getting better."
"Codgers" will point out that we've actually experienced wave after wave of life-altering technology: the mainframe, the personal computer, the Internet, desktop publishing, supply chain management, customer relationship management, cross-enterprise collaboration, pervasive computing and more. Behind each of these were a group of VCs that lost huge fortunes and a host of VCs that made great fortunes. What was the difference in their approaches? Probably timing.
“Codgers” will point out that in each decade, when businesses hit functional walls in Finance, HR, Sales or IT, smart companies come along and build long-lasting technology-driven businesses. Thus, when HR was faced with a morass of people and growth issues in the early 1980s, PeopleSoft was born; in the mid-1980s, when Finance was out of control, SAP grew dominant; and in the 1990s when sales VPs were out of control with their field forces, Tom Siebel solved their problem and grew a mammoth. Today, riding on the coattails of the torrid growth of computers and internet in the 1990s
, CIOs and their IT teams have been feeling out of control and have been asked to significantly curtail their spending and control their resources. Sound familiar?
“Codgers” will point out that the best times to start businesses (and perhaps to fund them) they’ve ever seen are when resources are plentiful, costs are down, and entrepreneurial sentiment is at its "scrappiest". Those Codgers told us "What goes up must come down" but it was hard to listen to them in early 2000. Those same Codgers are now telling us "What has gone down must go up." Who among us will listen to these old codgers?
True -- "the future ain't what it used to be" -- but that's what creates great opportunities for those with an outlook on the future and willingness to help make it a reality.
The iMinds Team
August 2002
