Not long is the short answer. A completely unscientific but reasonably educated guess is a couple of years. Here I explain why.
To some degree all new firms face an hourglass. Most firms fail and do so, mercifully, quickly. That happens because the firms aren’t nearly as good as they thought they […]

The movie promo for “The Social Network” screams “You Don’t Get to 500 Million Friends without Making a Few Enemies.” I haven’t seen it yet but I’ve heard that the film suggests that Mark Zuckerberg stole the idea for Facebook. That’s hardly a novel charge against innovators. The tech press couldn’t get […]

Our long-held view that contactless cards were going to fizzle has really gone mainstream. Take a look at Randall Stross’ piece in yesterday’s Sunday New York Times.
His piece, “Maybe Your Old Card is Smart Enough” makes the point that those [contactless smart cards] emperors really have no clothes. The promise of faster check-out (one of […]

Facebook wunderkind Mark Zuckerberg and his partners made it look easy. The social networking platform ignited almost immediately after it was introduced at Harvard College. It didn’t take many friends seeking friends and guys seeking girls and vice versa to create enough “fissionable material” as I discussed in the last entry. Within a week, more […]

Remember the kid’s story “The Little Engine That Could.” That describes what goes on with a lot of startups in two-sided markets. The train is trying to get up the mountain, but it needs to accelerate to offset the force of gravity that’s pushing it down. If it picks up enough momentum it can make […]

Hard data are not available but based on my experience billions of dollars each year go poof in the payments industry from investments in products that crash and burn soon after launch. These products didn’t have a sound ignition strategy which should be the foundation of all payments innovation. This series describes what […]