When Internet Time Ran Too Fast

from the being-right,-not-being-first dept

In a short excerpt from Roger McNamee's The New Normal, he talks about how, during the boom years, people became obsessed with "Internet Time" and the idea that you were better off being first, than being right, with your decisions. While it does help to be relatively quick with your decisions, that's only true if those decisions turn out to be the right ones. Deciding quickly and deciding badly don't really help much. It certainly sounds incredibly obvious, but at the time, many people simply ignored this or, in some cases, preached against it, saying you could always fix your mistakes later. Of course, what's most amusing is that the most guilty proponents of this theory were often venture capitalists who expected their portfolio companies to follow this "move fast" plan. Then, since some VCs were pushing it, others felt the need to follow, or feared being left behind when a market took off with someone else's company. So, to hear a VC now scold people for following this mantra seems a little silly. Not, of course, that all VCs are alike, but this would have seemed a bit more insightful had the book come out during the time this was happening.

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