There’s a lot of uncertainty, worry, and fear about regulation in the payments business. That was one of my takeaways from the 2-day conference on payments innovation MPD held at Harvard on November 4 and 5. People had been so focused on the Durbin devastation sweeping through retail banking that they put the new […]

MPD Payments Innovation Institute
Cambridge: November 4, 2010
Every new business needs a startup strategy: every new payments business and, more broadly, every new platform business needs its startup strategy to be an ignition strategy. I want to focus today on what sets ignition strategies apart from ordinary startup strategies and why they are so important for […]

It was really amazing to listen and learn from the array of innovators that assembled for the MPD [Payments] Innovation Institute last week. There were many important insights shared about how to find innovation, how get good ideas off the ground and making money, and how to get end users to switch away from […]

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 […]

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 […]

There’s a lot of speculation about the recent move by

“Network effect” strategy – once you tip the scale, growth is (hopefully) soon to follow. At least that’s what long time platform master Microsoft has experienced and what