Are you thinking long-term enough?
Warren Buffet was once asked by Jeff Bezos a long time friend of his: “you are the second richest man in the world and yet you have the simplest investment thesis. How come others didn’t follow this?” To which Warren Buffets responded: “because no one wants to get rich slowly”
In a nutshell that’s what’s wrong (or rather what’s not quite right) with a lot of the investment community today, from public markets to private equity investors and unfortunately it trickles down into too many companies. You can’t time-box success. You can’t sprint a marathon. And you can’t measure success with speed but only by the magnitude (and significance) of the end result. Building to flip is easy. Building to last is difficult and you cannot take short cuts.
This is my one biggest learning from being an entrepreneur now for 10 years. Every time I put the short term over the long term it backfired. Whether it’s not firing a misfit whom you ‘need’ today (or so you think) lest you create instability, or building stuff that generates immediate but not lasting growth. Maximizing for vanity metrics versus sanity.
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Is there still room for crazy 'moonshot' #innovation projects? Nice read on LT innovations imperative.
Well, thank god Tesla is now worth more than WhatsApp. Ouf! But, "try explaining to wall street that you want to conquer the depths of the ocean or develop commercial spaceflight and why that will - in the long term - serve shareholders and society better. Its no surprise that some of the biggest and boldest projects could not raise any funding like Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Tesla. If it weren’t for his own personal wealth none of these world changing innovations would come to fruition today."