But, just like in the martial arts, the best startups use the weight of their opponents against them. Bureaucracy slows down larger companies. People do less because making a mistake can be politically costly. Risk takers who are wrong get fired or lose power internally. The larger the company, the more likely it is to be slow.
If there's one competitive advantage that most startups have, it's that they can do more faster. And because they can do more faster they can learn more faster. They can immediately throw things away that don't work because nobody cares anyway. Nobody is trying to protect a brand that doesn't exist, and nobody has any reason to be afraid of small failures. Startups know that's just part of the process.
When you ask CEOs of major companies what they're most worried about, one common answer is "a couple of guys in a garage somewhere." Why? Because their larger and more established competitors have too much to lose to try something radically different. There's too much at stake for these large companies to try to blow up the market to disrupt the existing players. Relatively speaking, startups have nothing to lose and everything to gain by trying radical or non-obvious things. Larger companies are often baffled at just how much a startup can get done and it scares them.
One of the things we talk about with our startups at TechStars is that they simply have to do more faster. This doesn't mean doing random stuff--they still have to be thoughtful. But if they're not hyperproductive as small, nimble companies, then they're fighting from a real disadvantage. I'm such a big believer in this that I named my own angel fund Bullet Time Ventures. It's named after the move from the movie The Matrix, in which Neo is so fast that he can easily dodge bullets. His enemies seem so slow and he has an obvious advantage over them that can make all the difference in the (in his case, virtual) world.
Cohen and Feld talk about writing Do More Faster
When Occipital was in TechStars in 2008, they were faster than a speeding bullet. As a visual search company, they tried several products before having a runaway hit with RedLaser. All of them were interesting, but what really paid off for Occipital was their ability to try their ideas quickly and throw away what didn't work while focusing on what did. RedLaser was the fourth product Occipital worked on in about six months. This may sound disorganized and random on the surface, but Jeff and Vikas were very deliberate about assessing progress at every step.
Next Big Sound built an incredibly beautiful and functional product in under three months. SendGrid figured out how to scale their e-mail delivery infrastructure to 20 million e-mails a day in under a year. Oneforty rallied a community of thousands of Twitter application developers in just a few months. Intense Debate went from concept to being installed on hundreds of blogs in the course of a single summer. Companies that work just always seem to move at lightning pace. By contrast, the ones that don't seem to always be talking about releases and features that are coming "in a few months." How do the fast companies do it? They focus on what matters, and make massive progress in the areas that actually have an impact.
At TechStars and as an angel investor in general, I've been involved with a few startups that couldn't do more faster. They were just as slow to execute as larger competitors. They employed too much process too early, tried to convince themselves that they were absolutely right before taking risks, and thought at the expense of doing. Their great ideas couldn't save them. It turns out that giving up your one obvious competitive advantage often proves to be deadly. If a startup can't do more faster, it usually just gets dead faster.
and willowy blondes only take you so far, it turns out. Malefactors are punished. The universe is restored to balance.
This time, Gekko is a repentant father longing to make amends to win his daughter’s approval who also essentially steals a fortune from her to get back in the game.
Gekko is a humble reformed crook who has paid his debt to society and also a sleek alpha male puffing on a phallic cigar who can’t wait to gloat about his prowess at making money.
Gekko is a teacher who shares his knowledge. At times, one could swear that one had wandered into a parallel universe version of An Inconvenient Truth, as Gekko lectures us on the hazards of leverage and financial meltdown. Particularly priceless is when he calls a group of young students “ninjas”—no income, no job, no assets—adding, “You have a lot to look forward to.” But the same guy who observes that the mother of all evil is speculation turns up later in the film dressed in a power suit and giddy over his ability to turn $100 million into $1 billion. I don’t think he earned it at $25 an hour; leverage must have figured in there somewhere.
If we fast-forward 23 years to Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, we are treated to a curiously different kind of moral equation, the morality of “and also” rather than “either or.”
In the new film, Gordon Gekko is a humble reformed crook who has paid his debt to society and also a sleek alpha male who can’t wait to gloat about his prowess at making money. (20th Century Fox)
This “and also” value system also comes across in Gekko’s attitude to innovation. He is clearly cynical about clean tech and derides the “fusion delusion” as the next bubble. In his words, “the only green is money.” Yet at the end of the film, he gives $100 million away to support alternative energy and do something “good” with his money.
• Randall Lane: Wall Street on Wall Street
• Randall Lane: Gordon Gekko’s Secret Revealed
The film’s title may hold its final moral clue. If money never sleeps, then can greed not be far behind, even in these pinched times? No one in the film seems to be hurting for nice apartments and clothes, for example, even with a financial meltdown that has come from “the mother of all bubbles.” As Gekko himself puts it, “Greed got greedier with a little envy thrown in.”
So we’d all like to find a little absolution in these troubled times, and in fact in the end Gekko’s daughter does melt and forgive him, while we on the other hand—adding up all the “and alsos”—don’t know whether to follow suit.
This “and also” value system comes across in Gekko’s attitude to innovation. He is cynical about clean tech, yet in the end, he gives $100 million to support alternative energy.
Gordon, make up your mind. Maybe a little therapy would help.
Dubbed "Mr. Creativity" by The Economist, John Kao is a contributing editor at The Daily Beast and an adviser to both public and private sector leaders. He is chairman of the Institute for Large Scale Innovation, whose i20 group is an association of national innovation "czars." He wrote Jamming: The Art and Discipline of Business Creativity, a BusinessWeek bestseller, and Innovation Nation. He is also a Tony-nominated producer of film and stage.
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